DCAWD.com

Apple has ordered a gargantuan 12 petabytes of storage from Isilon – the recent EMC acquisition – to support its iTunes video service, according to report citing an "inside source".

According to to StorageNewsletter.com, Apple is "probably" the largest of Isilon's 1,500 customers as of the end of December. That may be an understatement.

Isilon Systems was acquired by EMC last November for $2.25bn, and is self-described as "the global leader in scale-out storage".

Those 12PB are likely destined for Apple's $1bn North Carolina data center, which is scheduled to go online ... right ... about ... now.

Or perhaps this fall. Although an Apple spokesman told attendees at the company's annual general meeting in February that the data center was "expected to open this spring," more-recent rumblings have pegged Apple's rise into the cloud to coincide with the release of iOS 5 – and, for that matter, Mac OS X Lion – which will likely not appear until later this year.

In addition to the video services to which StorageNewsletter.com's "inside sources" referred, the huge data center – and Isilon's 12PB – are likely to also support the long-rumored ascension of iTunes into the cloud, allowing tune junkies to store their music collections on Apple's service and access them from any device, anywhere.

Well, any Apple-approved device, that is.

Raven wrote:Must buy Apple stock before whatever this is going to be causes it to double.

Microsoft Data Center GM Timmons Heads to Apple

Kevin Timmons, who helped build the data centers that power Microsoft’s global cloud computing operation, has left the company and is expected to take a leadership position at Apple. The move strongly hints that Apple is stepping up its plans for an expansion of its data center infrastructure beyond its huge new facility in North Carolina.

more...

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/arch ... -to-apple/

PGT wrote:

Microsoft Data Center GM Timmons Heads to Apple

Kevin Timmons, who helped build the data centers that power Microsoft’s global cloud computing operation, has left the company and is expected to take a leadership position at Apple. The move strongly hints that Apple is stepping up its plans for an expansion of its data center infrastructure beyond its huge new facility in North Carolina.

more...

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/arch ... -to-apple/

Apple today confirmed that it will announce details for “iCloud, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering,” at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference next Monday. The announcement confirms the long-held assumption here at data Center Knowledge that th size of Apple’s new data center in North Carolina was a sure sign of a coming cloud offering. It also confirms that Apple has acquired the iCloud.com domain name for the service.

Apple offered no additional details on the iCloud service. It’s long been known that the new data center in North Carolina would support iTunes and MobileMe. The suspense has been whether those services would undergo a cloud transformation that would explain the enormous scale of the 500,000 square foot iDataCenter in North Carolina.

In recent weeks, Apple has added additional data center space in Silicon Valley to support a broadly-deployed. Most major Internet companies have major hubs on both coasts, which helps with content delivery and also provides the ability to keep copies of critical data “out of region” so that a single natural disaster wouldn’t threaten the survival of the data.

Want to know more about Apple’s data centers? See the Apple Data Center FAQ or check out some of our previous coverage:

complacent wrote:that could be damn near anything.

...stuff...

i'm absolutely dying to know what they're doing in the carolinas. it's literally causing me pain. it's this gigantic center that's just sitting there.

killing me.

avriette wrote:

complacent wrote:that could be damn near anything.

...stuff...

i'm absolutely dying to know what they're doing in the carolinas. it's literally causing me pain. it's this gigantic center that's just sitting there.

killing me.

...it could be storage for those messages we're receiving from aliens. they has pretty high bandwidth superbeams.