Apple places orders for 12 petabytes of storage from EMC: reports

Music czar Apple Inc has ordered as much as 12 Petabytes (12PB) of storage from Isilion Systems, a company that specializes in scaled storage to support its iTunes video service, according to a media 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.

12PB is a lot of data capacity, and if the report is accurate, it will likely be used in Apple's new data center in North Carolina. There have been much, more, various, sundry, and even a plethora of speculation on what Apple plans to do with this data center, with a lot of that speculation centered around iTunes, both for music and video delivery, storage, and streaming, digital lockers, and all other manner of activities and services, the Mac Observer writes.