Apple Orders 12 Petabytes Storage for Cloud Services from EMC Isilon

To manage cloud-based iTune downloads and other similar services, an inside source of EMC’s (News - Alert) new division told StorageNewsletter.com that Apple has ordered storage capacity as high as 12 Petabytes from Isilon Systems. Emc acquired Isilon last December for $2.25 billion. According to the Storagenewsletter.com report, Apple (News - Alert) is probably the largest of Isilon’s 1,500 customers as of December 2010.

The StorageNewsletter.com reports that on Aprill 11, Isilon will launch a new line of hardware and software. The storage site revealed that several journalists have been briefed under embargo on the new release. And it will also publish a deep analysis on the subject next week.

Meanwhile, IBM (News - Alert) reports on its site that Isilon OneFS operating system delivers industry leading NDMP backup performance to Isilon Scale-out storage integrated with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. According to IBM, Isilon OneFS 6.5 NDMP solution allows for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager to back-up an Isilon cluster via NDMP. It provides a powerful yet simple scale-out architecture that enables rapid scaling of both capacity and performance, and decreases the resources necessary to manage enterprise storage environments, said IBM.

The online tech publication The Register (News - Alert) speculates that the vast amount of storage will be for Apple’s North Carolina data center, which will be the home to new cloud-based storage options for iTunes as well as for social networking integration for iPhone (News - Alert) and MobileMe services. Part of this information was provided during Apple’s annual general meeting with share holders in February.

Data Center Knowledge wrote on its site that Apple intends to invest more than $1 billion over the next 10 years on its 183-acre data center campus in Maiden, NC. In a Q&A session, Data Center Knowledge website reported that the company has completed construction of a 505,000 square foot facility that ranks as one of the world’s largest data centers.