A report says that Apple has ordered 12 petabytes of video storage for iTunes.
StorageNewsLetter.com said the order for a staggering 12 petabytes (12,000 terabytes) of storage was placed with Isilon Systems, which is slated to be acquired by EMC for a cool $2.25 billion.
Isilon – headquartered in Seattle, Wash – designs and sells clustered storage systems and software for digital content. Unsurprisingly, EMC plans to leverage the company’s storage infrastructure tech to help support cloud computing services.
Apple Insider has previously reported that Apple is creating an indigenous “digital locker” service for cloud-based storage of media and content. Such a service would allow users to stream music and download images from a centralized server.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that today’s report makes no mention of the 12 petabytes being used for cloud services.
Still, Apple is likely to launch a cloud-based streaming music and video service in the future, if only to compete against Amazon’s cloud-powered storage plan – which leverages the speed and redundancy of Amazon’s massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.
As SCB previously reported, CloudDrive, CloudPlayer for Web, and CloudPlayer for Android represent the first consumer-oriented cloud offering from the e-commerce giant turned cloud provider.
The services allow users to store whatever files they want into the cloud, with a heavy focus on music. Customers start out with 5 GB free to use however they want. When an Amazon MP3 album is purchased, that space is automatically upgraded to 20 GB free for the first year. In addition, all Amazon MP3 purchases (saved directly to CloudDrive) are stored for free and do not count against your overall quota.
Source: StorageNewsLetter.com via Apple Insider