SAN FRANCISCO: IBM on Monday announced it has created the world's largest business computing "cloud" capable of holding an amount of digital data on a par with 250 billion iTunes songs.

The US technology titan's Internet-based in-house system is called Blue Insight and is designed to enable IBM's 200,000 employees to swiftly find answers or patterns in mountains of information.

"I expect this first-of-its-kind approach will help drive both new growth opportunities as well as have a significant impact in cost savings," said IBM chief information officer Pat Toole.

"This new model of cloud computing will provide our employees with a single place to access real business insights, improve standards compliance, and create a repository of best practices throughout our company."

Blue Insight will gather and analyze more than a petabyte of information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data storage areas.

A petabyte is equal to a million gigabytes. If that amount of information were in the form of text stuffed into four-drawer file cabinets, there would be enough of them to ring the planet, according to IBM.

IBM also unveiled an offering for businesses that want computing clouds of their own.

Blue Insight served as a template for the Smart Analytics Cloud systems, according to IBM.