Apple has ordered as much as 12 Petabytes (12PB) of storage from Isilion Systems, a company that specializes in scaled storage. For context, a Petabyte is 1,024 Terabytes, and a report from StorageNewsletter.com said that Apple will be using all of that capacity to manage video downloads relating to iTunes.
The report cited unnamed sources at EMC, the parent company of Isilion, and vaguely tied the purchase to a new line of storage hardware and software products from Isilion set to be announced April 11th (IBM reportedly spilled the beans on that new product line, which uses technology from IBM subsidiary Tivoli). The StorageNewsletter report said that the purchase “probably” makes Apple Isilion’s biggest customer.
12PB is a lot of data capacity, and if the report is accurate, it will likely be used in Apple’s new data center in North Carolina. There has been much, more, various, sundry, and even a plethora of speculation on what Apple plans to do with this data center, with a lot of that speculation centered around iTunes, both for music and video delivery, storage, and streaming, digital lockers, and all other manner of activities and services.
This rumor doesn’t give us any specific answers, but it does definitively indicate that Apple is planning something it takes seriously, and makes us giddy with anticipation.
A tiny fraction of 12PB