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Rumor: Apple buys 12 petabytes of video storage for iTunes

by Mike Schramm Apr 6th 2011 at 5:30PM

According to a site named StorageNewsletter.com, Apple has picked up a whopping 12 petabytes of data storage from a company named Isilon Systems. Supposedly, the new hardware (which makes Apple one of Isilon's biggest customers) will be used for storing video for iTunes, though because this information is unofficial, we have no idea if it has to do with Apple's new data center or some other operation Apple has planned around iTunes and its services.

What we can say is that a petabyte of data is a whole lot of freakin' data; it's 1024 terabytes. Consumer hard drives nowadays top out at 3 TB, with 1 TB holding the sweet spot. Enterprise deployments are more likely to use the faster and more reliable SAS drives (at smaller capacities), but even if you try to build out your storage with cheaper consumer-grade gear, it's a lot of data.

Put another way, if you tried to store a petabyte of data on dual-layer Blu-ray discs (50 GB each), it would take almost 21,000 discs to fit it all... and Apple just bought 12 of those. Especially when you add the concerns of redundancy, indexing, cold spares and all the other infrastructure concerns of enterprise storage, that is a lot of data space. It'll be interesting to see what they do with all of that storage.

[via All Things D]



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According to a site named StorageNewsletter.com, Apple has picked up a whopping 12 petabytes of data storage from a company named Isilon...
 

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Cheshyr

I suspect it's for cloud storage, ala Amazon.com's new service. If so, it's frankly about time. While I don't feel a need to host my data remotely, Apple has been irresponsible in their attitude to customers purchases. By not allowing customers to re-download purchases, Apple guarantees that there will be problems down the line, and that you, the customer, will have to pay again when that happens.

April 12 2011 at 3:48 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mr Lizard

It's for a Time Machine backup of the internet.

April 07 2011 at 4:23 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Andrew Carson

Interestingly enough, that number is just shy of the amount information a human brain can hold...and to think how much more expensive it is. Soon the tech world will be cloning humans to hold database information, so much more economical :)

April 07 2011 at 9:52 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Andrew Carson's comment
Brett

Great, you just triggered the rumors that Steve Jobs' brain is being digitized for future use.

On a more serious note... the human brain doesn't hold data the same way a computer does. I'm no expert, but I find claims that the human brain is capable of x-amount of storage to be highly dubious.

April 07 2011 at 11:27 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Richard

Yawn. Old news, received the email from EMC 12 hours ago. So yesterday.

Next.

April 07 2011 at 9:23 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
DT

Is it Petabyte or Pebibyte?

April 07 2011 at 5:14 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
ted

If the storage is for video for the iTunes store, then this seems quite reasonable. 12 PB is likely enough to store 35-70K HD movies. That is apparently in excess of the number of movies ever released (in English, anyway), large numbers of which (especially pre-1960's) have never been digitized. So this is plausibly enough storage to hold _all_ the movies with quite a bit of space left for TV shows. As you say, if they have a copy of each of the source videos, the mapping from purchasers to the videos themselves takes effectively no space, so this would likely handle a media locker for iTunes purchases very well. As copyright violation concerns would likely limit Apple's interest in holding random uploaded media files for users, that's probably all they would offer.

April 07 2011 at 3:52 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mxsix

12.5 MILLION Gigabytes. That's a lot of 1's and 0's.

April 07 2011 at 3:33 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mike

The whole point of the OneFS seems to be to eliminate the need to manage data across multiple physical LUNs or virtual arrays. I'm sorry, but this seems like something Apple has long since abstracted. There is a very notable OS that still has built-in limitations on addressing storage. It uses drive letters or something.

April 06 2011 at 11:12 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Colin

Mark this date, because for the next three years 1/2 the rumors will have "Is this what apple is doing with that 12PB they bought in April of '11?"

April 06 2011 at 8:37 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
intersignben

There will be a day when 12PB will fit in the palm of your hand...

April 06 2011 at 7:57 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to intersignben's comment
dilspam

12PB is most definitely RAW, unformatted space. Pretty standard day technology in the June timeframe. This will easily fit 2.0 PB in a single rack to deliver over 40GB/sec out of the 40u "re-fridge size rack". ho-hum.

6 refrigerator size racks pumping 10KVA, mundane. Hope they get upwards of 240GB/sec out of the system or they got duped.

April 08 2011 at 12:50 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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