The storage array will support an MIT Media Lab project called the Human Speechome Project that is studying how babies develop the ability to talk. The project began three months ago when MIT associate professor Deb Roy began recording his baby's everyday life through the use of 14 fish-eye lens cameras set up throughout his house, giving researchers a bird's-eye view of every room.

In order to store and then process the video and audio data, a massive storage area network (SAN) was needed to archive and search what is expected to be 1.4 petabytes of data, or 1,400TB of data, over the span of the three-year project.

The SAN is being built from commodity hardware and uses a 10GbE IP network for data transfer between the backend SAN and hundreds of servers.

"I think here what we're seeing is what the future of storage is going to be like. This is a great marriage between industry and the academic world," said Frank Moss, director of the Media Lab and a former CEO of Tivoli Systems Inc., a maker of storage management software now owned by IBM.

Moss spoke at a press conference held Monday at MIT's Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass.