Could this be translated as "billions and billions" or "billions upon billions"?

Literally it says billions of billions, but in context it most likely means billions upon billions.

Why? Petabytes seems like a more likely order of magnitude than gigabytes, doesn't it?

eta: From the article: "capable of managing dozens of petaoctets of data, in other words dozens of millions of gigaoctets"

Actually 'zillions' is probably the most accurate translation.

No. The correct translation is "billions of billions"

Ack, you're right. My French teachers would not be impressed.

Hi, I wrote this post. I see that everyone is as confused as I was with the "milliards de milliards" :) "Millions of trillions" is the right way to say it in English I believe (if you don't want to go over trillions). I edited the headline a couple of minutes after publishing to correct my mistake. Sorry!

google says

10^18 bytes in petabytes = 888.17 petabytes

or basically a million terabytes if you round up.

basically 3 million 1TB hard drives in raid 5 (1M x 3). you can probably fit a 500 1TB 2.5" drives into a single rack if you really try, and 2,000 racks can fit easily into warehouse-sized facility. (grid of 100 x 20 racks)