A petabyte (derived from the SI prefixpeta- ) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quadrillionbytes. It is commonly abbreviated PB. Because of a traditional inconsistency, "petabytes" are often intended to mean pebibytes in common speech. This usage is not recommended as it creates confusion (see below) and has been facing increasing opposition by many technical standards and legal entities in the past few years.
Because of irregularities in using the binary prefix in the definition and usage of the kilobyte, the exact number in common practice could be either one of the following:
1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes — 10005, or 1015.
1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes — 10245, or 250. This capacity may be expressed unambiguously as a pebibyte.
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. (as of May 2006)[2]
The first commercially available Petabyte Storage Array was launched by the EMC Corporation in January 2006, with an approximate cost of USD 4 million. [3]
In March of 2005, Teradata announced the world's first single server with roughly 500 gigabytes of storage capable of scaling to a multiserver system that can scale up to 4.2 petabytes in size for commercial decision support.[4]
NOB Cross media facilities in the Netherlands employs a 1.5 petabyte storage network for the storage of all old and new public television and radio content in digital format. Within the next year, most Dutch public television content will be pulled directly out of this database during broadcast.
Google in 2003 had between 2 and 5 petabytes of hard-disk storage. A more recent calculation[5], dated June 272006, suggests that the Google cluster may now have 4 petabytes of RAM, on the same order of magnitude as the quantity of hard disk space that was estimated only three years earlier.[6]
RapidShare in 2006 had 1,08 Petabyte of hard-disk storage.
As of October 152005, all the files being shared on Kazaa totaled around 54 petabytes.
As of January 2006, the http://www.climateprediction.netdistributed computing experiment which aims to run thousands of cycles of modelled climate change to predict future patterns is producing 2-3 petabytes of data. This project is conducted via the computing power of thousands of home users whose computers crunch numbers in their spare, 'idle' time.
Managed Storage Services offering in IBM Global Services manages more than two petabytes for IBM customers around the world.[8]
CERN has, with its newly installed LHC, a datastream with 8 petabyte/year during the collision of small particles.
GridKa (The European Tier1 in Karlsruhe/Germany) plans to extend its disk capacity to 4.2 petabytes for the LHC datastream.
Indiana University announced on April 52006 that it is acquiring the nation's fastest university-owned supercomputer and largest disk-based research storage facility. This new supercomputer will be connected to more than 1 petabyte of high speed disk storage. This includes DataDirect Networks high performance storage and will be by far the largest of its type of university-owned storage in the United States.[9]
In fiction
The fictional character Data on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation is purported to have 100 petabytes of storage space.
