Data Management Glossary
Petabyte
What is a petabyte?
A petabyte (PB) is a unit of data storage that represents 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 10^15 bytes. It is 1000x larger than a terabyte (TB) and one million times larger than a gigabyte (GB).
Petabytes are commonly used to describe the capacity of large-scale data storage systems, run by data heavy industries such as those used in scientific research, big data analytics, and cloud computing. For example, a single petabyte could store over 200 million 5 MB photos, or about 13.3 years’ worth of HD video content.
There are 1,000 petabytes (PB) in a zettabyte (ZB). In other words, 1 zettabyte is equal to 1,000,000 petabytes, or 10^21 bytes.
In recent years, with the exponential growth of data generation and the need for high performance, yet cost effective data storage, the term “zettabyte” has become increasingly relevant in discussions around big data and data management. It’s worth noting that even larger units of storage exist, including yottabytes (10^24 bytes) and brontobytes (10^27 bytes), but these are not yet commonly used.
From TechTarget: What is a petabyte?
How big is a petabyte?
According to Teradata, one petabyte is equal to one quadrillion bytes, which is 1 million gigabytes, or 1,000 terabytes. Some estimates hold that a Petabyte is the equivalent of 20 million tall filing cabinets or 500 billion pages of standard printed text.
Here is a breakdown of the size of a petabyte:
- Bytes: A petabyte is equal to 1,024 terabytes (TB)
- Equivalent Measurements:
- 1 PB = 1,024 TB
- 1 PB = 1,048,576 gigabytes (GB)
- 1 PB = 1,073,741,824 megabytes (MB)
- 1 PB = 1,099,511,627,776 kilobytes (KB)
- 1 PB = 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes
Petabyte Comparison Examples
- A typical HD movie is about 4-5 GB in size. A petabyte could store around 200,000 HD movies.
- An average MP3 song is about 5 MB. A petabyte could hold approximately 210 million songs.
- A 1 terabyte hard drive can store around 250,000 photos. A petabyte could hold about 256 million photos.
The bottom line is that a petabyte is an enormous amount of data storage, most of which is unstructured data. This volume of data is typically suitable for large-scale data centers, cloud storage providers, and organizations that handle massive amounts of information. Healthcare organizations, which produce more data than most other sectors, has on average 50PB of data (per hospital).
Petabyte-Scale Unstructured Data Management and Data Migration
At Komprise we talk about petabyte-scale unstructured data management and data migrations. For example, Komprise Analysis analyzes across hundreds of petabytes without impacting performance. Read the press release. Komprise executes petabyte-scale file data migrations across many NAS and cloud storage technologies.
Komprise enterprise customers are distributed across healthcare, life sciences, biotech, media and entertainment, public sector, higher education, financial services, legal, energy, high-tech and other industries managing petabyte-scale unstructured data environments. Learn more about Komprise Intelligent Data Management.
Petabyte FAQs
How much enterprise data is measured in petabytes and what is driving petabyte-scale growth?
Most large enterprises today manage storage environments measured in petabytes, not terabytes. Industries including healthcare, life sciences, media and entertainment, financial services, higher education, and engineering generate petabytes of data annually through medical imaging, genomics research, video production, transaction records, research datasets, and simulation outputs. A single hospital system averages 50 petabytes of data, and that volume is growing rapidly as digital pathology, AI-assisted diagnostics, and genomics sequencing become standard practice.
Unstructured data is the primary driver of petabyte-scale growth. It now represents 80-90% of all enterprise data according to IDC and Gartner, and it is growing at 55-65% annually. Most of this growth lands on NAS environments by default, where it accumulates across file shares and volumes without consistent classification, governance, or lifecycle management. The result is that most enterprise petabyte-scale storage environments contain a significant proportion of cold, redundant, or ungoverned data sitting on expensive primary storage that was never designed to hold data at this volume indefinitely.
Read the latest Komprise State of Unstructured Data Management report.
Why does managing petabyte-scale unstructured data require a different approach than smaller environments?
At terabyte scale, storage administrators can manually audit file shares, identify large or old files, and manage data placement with reasonable effort. At petabyte scale, manual approaches break down entirely. Scanning billions of files across dozens of NAS volumes and cloud storage environments to find cold data, classify sensitive content, or identify candidates for tiering is not feasible without an automated, analytics-driven platform.
Komprise Intelligent Data Management is specifically designed for petabyte-scale unstructured data environments. Komprise scans across hundreds of petabytes without impacting production performance, building a comprehensive index in the Global Metadatabase that captures metadata for every file across every storage environment. Komprise Deep Analytics then searches this index using metadata and custom tag criteria to find precisely the data that needs to be acted on, whether that is cold data to be tiered, sensitive data to be classified, or specific research datasets to be curated for AI pipelines. Komprise has been proven at 100 petabytes and above across the most demanding enterprise environments, and its patented scale-out architecture is designed to grow with the data estate rather than requiring re-architecture as volumes increase.
Learn more about the Komprise architecture.
How much does it cost to store a petabyte of data and how can enterprises reduce those costs?
The cost of storing a petabyte of data varies significantly by storage tier and technology. High-performance flash-based primary NAS typically costs several hundred thousand dollars per petabyte per year when factoring in hardware, software licensing, power, cooling, and management overhead. Cloud object storage costs significantly less, with major cloud providers offering rates from a few dollars to tens of dollars per terabyte per month depending on the access tier.
The problem most enterprises face is that petabyte-scale unstructured data environments are not optimized by storage tier. Cold data that has not been accessed in over 90 days, which typically represents 60-70% of enterprise NAS capacity, occupies the same expensive primary storage as actively used hot data. With enterprise SSD and NAND flash prices rising 53-58% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, the cost of keeping cold petabytes on primary storage is higher than ever.
Komprise Intelligent Tiering addresses this by identifying cold data based on last accessed time or other attributes in a Deep Analytics query and automatically moving it to lower-cost cloud or object storage via Transparent Move Technology so there is no disruption to users or applications. Tiered data remains accessible in native format from its original path via Dynamic Links, with no rehydration required. Komprise customers consistently reclaim 70% or more of primary NAS capacity, and the Komprise Flash Stretch Assessment quantifies the specific savings opportunity in each customer’s environment before any action is taken. At current market prices, Komprise has identified savings opportunities of $350,000 or more per petabyte of flash for organizations that right-place cold unstructured data.
How does Komprise handle petabyte-scale data migration without downtime or disruption?
Moving petabytes of data between NAS systems, storage vendors, or cloud environments is one of the most complex operations in enterprise IT. At petabyte scale, migrations that require downtime windows are not viable, and point tools like rsync and robocopy are error-prone, slow, and require significant manual oversight that does not scale to hundreds or thousands of terabytes.
Before migration begins, the Komprise ACE tool assesses the customer environment, analyzing network topology, identifying potential bottlenecks, and testing read/write performance across the specific source and destination infrastructure. This pre-migration assessment surfaces issues such as firewall configurations, routing problems, and WAN limitations before they disrupt the migration rather than during it.
Komprise Elastic Data Migration then executes the migration using Komprise Hypertransfer technology, which eliminates WAN bottlenecks and chatty protocol overhead to deliver migration speeds up to 27x faster than standard SMB, NFS, and S3 transfer methods. The migration runs in the background while users and applications continue to operate normally. Full fidelity is verified with MD5 checksums at the file level, and chain of custody reporting satisfies requirements for regulated industries. Komprise Elastic Data Migration has been proven at 100 petabytes and above and supports any-to-any migrations across NFS, SMB, dual-mode, mixed-mode, and S3 or object environments.
How does petabyte-scale unstructured data relate to AI readiness?
AI models, RAG pipelines, and data analytics platforms can only work with data that is accessible, well-classified, and governed. At petabyte scale, the challenge is not finding enough data for AI but finding the right data within a vast, ungoverned estate and delivering it to AI systems in a form they can use. Most enterprise petabyte-scale NAS environments were not built with AI access in mind. Files lack consistent metadata, cold data is mixed with active working files, sensitive content is not classified, and there is no unified index across multi-vendor storage environments.
Komprise makes petabyte-scale unstructured data AI-ready through a combination of capabilities. Komprise scans the full data estate and builds the Global Metadatabase, providing a unified index of every file across every storage environment. Komprise Deep Analytics queries this index using metadata and custom tags to find precisely the datasets relevant to a specific AI use case. KAPPA data services extract domain-specific custom metadata from file content, enriching the Global Metadatabase with business context that standard file system metadata cannot provide. Komprise Smart Data Workflows then automate the curation and delivery of governed, right-placed datasets to AI platforms in native format, with sensitive data detected and classified before ingestion. The result is that petabyte-scale unstructured data estates that were previously inaccessible to AI programs become active, governed AI data assets without requiring manual data preparation for each new AI project.