Apple buying 12 petabytes of storage for iTunes online

By Rene Ritchie
last updated

According to Storage Newsletter, Apple has purchased 12 petabytes (1 petabyte is 1024 terabytes, so over 12,000 terabytes) of storage from EMC's Isilon Systems, reported for use with iTunes to store music, movies, TV, and other media content online.

Obviously this will be hugely expensive -- you don't buy this level of storage from Best Buy, after all -- but storing huge amounts of data with both staging, local, and off-site backup doesn't come cheap. If Apple wants to offer something similar to Amazon's Cloud Locker service in the future, this much storage will certainly come in handy.

It's interesting Apple is choosing to go the Isilon route rather than use massive amounts of commodity drives the way Google does. Any data experts out there have a theory on that?

(And yes, if you're trying to figure out how many MKVs you could store on 12PB the answer very nearly is -- all of them.)

(Storage Newsletter via AI)

Rene Ritchie
Rene Ritchie
Contributor

Rene Ritchie is one of the most respected Apple analysts in the business, reaching a combined audience of over 40 million readers a month. His YouTube channel, Vector, has over 90 thousand subscribers and 14 million views and his podcasts, including Debug, have been downloaded over 20 million times. He also regularly co-hosts MacBreak Weekly for the TWiT network and co-hosted CES Live! and Talk Mobile. Based in Montreal, Rene is a former director of product marketing, web developer, and graphic designer. He's authored several books and appeared on numerous television and radio segments to discuss Apple and the technology industry. When not working, he likes to cook, grapple, and spend time with his friends and family.