Apr 6, 2011
Apple has reportedly ordered 12 petabytes of storage, likely for the new data center that the company is opening in North Carolina. This amount of storage space is truly staggering — about 12.5 million gigabytes, or 4,096 3-terabyte hard drives. Reportedly, the storage space will have something to do with Apple’s video download services for iTunes, but we think something more may be afoot.
At the beginning of the year, Robert X. Cringely outlined an interesting series of predictions. First, Cringely suggested that Apple is gradually moving away from large amounts of local storage in its computers and other devices, in favor of cloud storage. However, one of the biggest problems currently facing cloud computing is that ISPs simply cannot handle the bandwidth demands. Until you can get the data you want just as quickly as if it were stored on your own computer, users will continue to prefer local storage over cloud storage. Cringely sees Apple buying Time Warner Cable to circumvent this problem. Apple has the massive cash reserves to make this purchase happen, and once Apple owns the Internet pipe, they can give preference to iTunes file transfers to help ensure that they always take place instantly.
More importantly, though, this move would likely cement Apple as the dominant company in media; imagine an Internet bill that included unlimited streaming music and videos from iTunes, all guaranteed to start playing on your computer, Apple TV or iPad without any waiting — people would likely eat it up. Also, by purchasing Time Warner Cable, Apple would become a powerful player in the television industry. Remember the beginning of Pirates of Silicon Valley, when Steve Jobs’ character talks about how the first thing that a dictator does after taking over a country is to take over the ways that people communicate and receive information? Interesting…