That data has to be stored and secured on location and sent each day to post-production facilities, which is done by transferring it to tape and physically shipping it, because networks aren't fast enough, Ward said. The footage and associated metadata is used throughout the editing of the movie, and is then compressed into formats for use in theaters and homes. But studios want to keep all the original footage, just as they used to keep the uncut film, to use years later for sequels and other projects, he said. A 3-D movie may take up 1 petabyte of capacity, and the industry is still working on how to handle that.

"There isn't a digital archival media that meets the archivists' standards," Ward said.

Health-care data demand

The health-care industry is facing the prospect of even more data than the entertainment business, according to Paul Markham, vice president of global strategy and marketing at TeraMedica. On Thursday, his company is introducing a medical archiving system based on IBM hardware and software. The medical records of a patient in the U.S. represent on average about 1 terabyte of data today, and one 300-bed hospital may generate 30T bytes of data per year, Markham said. Those figures will only grow with higher-resolution medical imaging, he said.

"It's such a tsunami of data, they just don't know what to do with it," Markham said. He believes the future technologies IBM envisions will be necessary to keep up.