Definition of petabyte - What it is, Meaning and Concept

The byte is part of the so-called information units .It is equivalent to eight bits and allows, through its multiples, to refer to various storage measures.

A petabyte , in this sense, is a byte multiple that equals 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (en say, ten to fifteen bytes ).This is a unit larger than gigabyte or terabyte , but smaller than units like the exabyte , the zettabyte or the yottabyte .

When decomposing this unit of information, we discover that those to which we are accustomed to the present seem insignificant: the petabyte is formed by 1,024 terabytes , which, to in turn, it is equivalent to 1,024 gigabytes and so you must continue until you reach the byte, passing through the megabyte and the kilobyte.It is important to note that, although the prefix kilo is the same one used to represent decimal units (such as km ), the multiple of the information units is not 1000, but 1024 , since they are not decimals, but binary.

The use of each unit of information depends on the context.For example, when the amount of information of a given system is so large that it is impracticable to quantify it through units such as bytes or kilobytes, it is usually resort to petabytes, something that is impractical when mentioning the weight of digital files contained in a computer for personal use.

Petabytes, therefore, are used to name very large flows of information.The traffic of the world's most popular websites , data processed by search engines such as Google or the transferences that are specified in the networks of the main Internet providers can be estimated in petabytes since they represent very high figures.If someone would like to name the data processed by Google in a month by means of kilobytes For example, you would have to appeal to such a large number of zeros that your notation would be very difficult to understand.

Other common uses for the petabyte concept are as follows:

* information traffic reports in the field of telecommunications : remember that certain companies keep people from various parts of the world connected through devices that are used over several hours per day, so that the volume of information that passes through their networks is too large to count using units smaller than petabyte.So much so that the AT&T company, for example, registers an average of 30 petabytes of information exchange on a daily basis;

* supercomputer storage and memory devices : in 2012, the American company Cray Inc.started the construction of a supercomputer called Blue Waters , which has a storage capacity of 25 petabytes on disk and up to 500 on magnetic tape.Its memory main (what we usually know by the name of RAM ) is 1.5 petabytes;

* databases : far from the volume of records of a family business, multinationals need a colossal infrastructure to store and process the data of all their customers and its products in this era in which all corporate information must exist in digital format.Both the bases of daily use for the interaction of users with systems such as those intended for the archiving of old information, the volume of data of certain companies can be calculated in several tens of petabytes;

* storage of images and videos : companies such as YouTube and Facebook require storage volumes difficult to imagine for their users.Already in 2013, Facebook recorded the load of more than 350 million pictures every day.