What is petabyte? - Definition from WhatIs.com

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.

Related glossary terms: hard disk, magnetoresistive head technology, yottabyte, serverless backup, byte, partition, InfiniBand, failover, RAMAC (random access method of accounting and control), Fibre Channel

Contributor(s): Fred Elliott

This was last updated in September 2005

Editorial Director: Margaret Rouse

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