Question: What’s 500 000 square feet and needs 12 petabytes of storage space?
Answer: We have no freakin’ clue.
StorageNewsletter is reporting that Apple has purchased 12 petabytes of storage from Isilon Systems.
It’s being speculated that the storage would be used to manage the videos of iTunes customers. It’s pretty easy to make the assumption that Apple’s working on cloud storage for Apple users, but there’s little evidence to support that this purchase is directly tied to those rumors.
We do know that Apple’s planning on flipping the switch of their brand new data center in North Carolina sometime this spring, but we don’t know specifically what it’s for at this point. During a financial call Apple vaguely noted that it was for MobileMe and iTunes. Other than that, we’ve got nothing concrete. With that in mind, it may be a bit late to get the 16 petabytes into the center for launch, unless this order was placed months ago. The StorageNewsletter website isn’t very clear on that point. They’ve stated that: “[Apple’s] probably the largest of its 1,500 customers recorded at the end of December, including 20% in Europe.” Apple has also been rumored to be looking at doubling their data center in North Carolina in the future—this order could be for that center.
Who knows, we might be listening to our music and streaming our video from the cloud any day now.
Article Via Apple Insider
