A Petabyte is a lot of data.

A Petabyte is a lot of data.

 

We all know 1 GB is the same as 1024 MB, but did you know that 1 petabyte (PB) is equivalent to 1024 terabytes (TB)?

To give an example of how big this is, a 1 PB hard drive could hold 13.3 years of HD-TV video.

A 50 PB hard drive could hold the entire written works of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages.

When a customer says to me, "Hey, I've got two petabytes of tape data I need to move," it’s time to talk about the physics of a petabyte and what that really means. How long to move it, and what work it will take to get it from the legacy storage location into modernized data management.

Sometimes this data has been protected, backed-up and stored for decades, or longer. In many cases, the tape drives or storage subsystems are out of maintenance, out of support, and problematic to use any longer.

Other times, the physical media itself is aging out with the tape media disintegrating so that it is uncertain if it will be possible to read data stored on it.

Until the time comes to move all that data, many customers simply think of it as a number — whether they’ve got a 200 terabyte or 60 petabyte pile of data. These are large, unimaginable amounts of data.

Data managers don’t have a way to visualize the actual volume of data they’re dealing with, and most are just flabbergasted when they truly understand the practical implications of moving it forward into a modern backup environment or growing it under current business requirements.