StorageNewsletter reports that Apple has ordered 12 petabytes of storage from Isilon Systems to reportedly support iTunes video content and various media.
12 petabytes. That’s 12,288 TB, or 12,582,912 GB. Wow.
Apple ordered as much as 12PB of capacity from Isilon Systems, notably to manage the video download of its customers using iTunes, according to an inside source of the new division of EMC.
This storage probably has a link to Apple’s new data center outside of Maiden, North Carolina, which is expected to go online soon to support iTunes and MobileMe services.
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Ho-ly. Is there a cap on how much space per user has allocated? Most likely…
Theres 100+ mil of i devices so that means 100 mb per device?
12 PB sounds like a lot (because it uses a prefix we haven’t heard before–peta), but when you do the math it isn’t that much.
12 PB = 12,000,000 GB
Let’s say the average music collection is 32 GB.
12,000,000 GB / 32 GB = 375,000 users.
Considering the number of iOS devices, 375k is a huge underestimate.
Let’s say each user gets 1 GB space. That allows 12 million people to use it. Not bad…but I think that’s still on the low side.
Let’s say everyone gets 100 MB space. That’s 120 million people. That’s much more reasonable…but 100 MB isn’t that much storage.
If Apple really wants to move iTunes “to the cloud”, my conclusion is that this will be the first purchase of storage space that Apple makes.
Add a cost to the cloud service and the number of people that use it will decrease.
Also aside from their order of 12 PB, I wonder how much storage Apple already has.
Plus with AT&T & Version having data caps will cause an even smaller number using the cloud service to stream their stuff. I doubt Apple will work out a deal to allow free data when using Apple’s cloud service.
The article says this is just for VIDEO…
Also, the way I forsee it working is that they will only have one copy of their songs/video online but you pay for the right to download/stream it as many times as you want. I don’t think we will all be uploading our personal collections to this place. Stuff we have already purchased will now simply become stream-able to any idevice/computer we want. Right?