A petabyte in a rack unit

The other device IBM is working on, which it called simply the "petabyte storage device," would be designed to store data for as long as 50 years without the need for migration to another medium, Hillsberg said. Moving content from one device to a newer generation of hardware costs money and time and can introduce record-keeping errors, he said.

Without giving more details about the device, Hillsberg said it would have some moving parts but not as many as a tape library, the typical solution for long-term archiving today. He envisions it being used not as a replacement for tape but in conjunction with it, possibly to provide access to archived data over a cloud infrastructure.

Hollywood's storage woes

The movie industry is now grappling with dramatically larger data sets on the scale that the petabyte device is designed to address, according to Peter Ward, a digital entertainment consultant and former senior vice president of Sony Pictures Entertainment. As filmmakers gradually swap reels of film for SSDs, a day of shooting can generate hundreds of terabytes of data, Ward said. The 2011 Facebook drama "The Social Network" is one recent film that was shot digitally, he said.