Definition

petabyte

A petabyte is a measure of memory or storage capacity and is 2 to the 50th power bytes or, in decimal, approximately a thousand terabytes.

In recently announcing how many Fibre Channel storage arrays they had sold, Sun Microsystems stated that it had shipped an aggregate of two petabytes of storage or the equivalent of 40 million four-drawer filing cabinets full of text. IBM says that it has shipped four petabytes of SSA Storage.

Also see petaflop.

Contributor(s): Fred Elliott
This was last updated in September 2005
Posted by: Margaret Rouse

Email Alerts

Register now to receive SearchStorage.com-related news, tips and more, delivered to your inbox.
By submitting you agree to receive email from TechTarget and its partners. If you reside outside of the United States, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Privacy

More News and Tutorials

  • Coming in the August 2011 issue of Storage magazine

    A sneak peek at Storage magazine's August 2011 issue. Learn more about the state of backup deduplication, storage virtualization and new trends in data storage.

  • Coming in the July 2011 issue of Storage magazine

    A sneak peek at Storage magazine's July 2011 issue. Learn more about backing up virtual servers, performance tips and how to turn your data center storage into a storage cloud.

  • Storage magazine May 2011 PDF

    Download Storage magazine's all-digital issue at no cost. This month: The benefits, functions, future outlook and buying considerations for automated tiered storage technologies.

Do you have something to add to this definition? Let us know.

Send your comments to techterms@whatis.com
Back to top