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Apple Locks in 12 Petabytes of iTunes Video Content Storage?
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I'm moving in the opposite direction. I ran my own server for years. Now my web site resides on App Engine and my data will be backed up off site. Much less hastle than before.
It doesn't sound like all that much, Apple has a possible 100 million customers if MobileMe becomes free to use as backup. That is about 120 MB per user, pathetic. How much does Amazon have at the moment?
That is raw data space so no redundancy but also not compressed, i think raw data = usable data.
That is raw data space so no redundancy but also not compressed, i think raw data = usable data.
To get that much storage you would need 1,000,000,000,000 Mac Mini Servers which costed at full retail is 70x the US national debt.
Apple's 500,000 sq ft data centre usuing Doctor Q's 10 fot of usuable vertical space could hold 104,088,861 not accounting for heat dissapation cabling storage racks etc. Therefore you would need 9,607 data centres of the size of apple's current (which was rumored to cost $1billion). However that is a storage facility literally filled with no walking space between the racks or anything like that so a sensible suggestion would be to double that.
The total size of this project would be 9,607,000,000 sq ft or 344 sq miles. Turks and Caicos Islands happens to 366 sq miles, although to allow for expansion, shipping port/airport and power plants and other ancilallry buildings such as worker housing, supermarket and such I would suggest that Hong Kong with an area of 426 sq miles is a good place to start. Although given the high population of Hong Kong it isn't an ideal place to build such a facility, therefore the Faroe Islands with a size of 538 miles might be the first sensible place to wipe out. Alternatively you could just dump it in Texas/Alaska as they have plenty of land spare. Alaska would give you natural cooling which would be a bonus over Texas although can you image the series of Ice Road truckers, "In this haul is 100,000 Mac Minis."
All in all to go for something like large with some as inappropriate as a Mac Mini is a costly and ultimately bonkers idea.
Fingers crossed that the sums are correct.
Good work! I've just double checked your figures and they are accurate (ahem)
I suppose the original question should have been, "What have Apple got in there?"
Maybe Steve Jobs has another hobby going, a new Xserve!
Possibly something custom designed or taken from existing designs of other storage giants. Like Google where they use velcro.
But on the plus side, Apple would have 99% of the Global Market share in Personal Computers for the first time.
doubtful
12 pb per storage unit maybe.
while it seems to be a mindbogling amount of data- it does not seem like a lot for datacenter storage.
it will fill about 24 datacenter cabinets - the giganormous thing apple is building on the east coast should be able to host 1000's of such cabinets.
to put it in perspective - some netbook vendors provide 250 gb of online storage with the purchase of their kit. if 40000 users fill up their allotted space with photos, videos documents etc , that will fill up 10 PB of storage. now consider there are 2.5 million ipads out there.... if mobileme users start using 100Gb a piece of online storage to store videos of their dog playing in the park etc. in the cloud, that is 250 million GB or 250 PB of data. so unless i am reading this wrong 12 PB doesnt seem to cut it.
12 pb per storage unit maybe.
while it seems to be a mindbogling amount of data- it does not seem like a lot for datacenter storage.
it will fill about 24 datacenter cabinets - the giganormous thing apple is building on the east coast should be able to host 1000's of such cabinets.
to put it in perspective - some netbook vendors provide 250 gb of online storage with the purchase of their kit. if 40000 users fill up their allotted space with photos, videos documents etc , that will fill up 10 PB of storage. now consider there are 2.5 million ipads out there.... if mobileme users start using 100Gb a piece of online storage to store videos of their dog playing in the park etc. in the cloud, that is 250 million GB or 250 PB of data. so unless i am reading this wrong 12 PB doesnt seem to cut it.
maybe i missed it but why is everyone saying that is not much storage? they are not going to store a copy of a movie for each person. they will just store a movie and allow everyone that has access to that file read it. That makes sense to me and will allow a crap load of media to be saved there.
dedup
interesting concept - if used to store mobileme type data and with original content like videos taken with hd video capable phones, is dedup as effective - just wondering -
interesting concept - if used to store mobileme type data and with original content like videos taken with hd video capable phones, is dedup as effective - just wondering -
This isn't solid state storage, so TRIM is not even in the picture.
The last quote I got for a 300GB SSD module for our SAN was $17,500 (after a 50% "discount" from list), about six months ago. So if we assume that the price has gone down a bit since then and Apple gets crazy volume discounts, let's assume they'd pay around $10k. Times 40,000 units, we'd be talking $400M just for the drives themselves, not counting the hot spares, enclosures, controllers, switches, licensing, and all the other ancillary stuff involved. We'd be somewhere between a half and three quarters of a billion dollars.
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I didn't even know that much storage could exist lol
I didn't even know that much storage could exist lol
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Lol I love pita bites
dustinsc said:
Lol I love pita bites
Well we don't know what they got, do we? It could be that their 12TB is already allocatable space. They could also already have near-online and offline storage in an existing SAN.
For larger storage arrays you don't use regular raid-5 or raid-10 either. Raid tech is a bit more complicated if you have 20.000 disks or whatever they have..
You forgot to mentioned the nuclear powerplants that would be required to run this as well as the affects on global warning this would have ;-)
And I remember my first 30mb external hard drive that only cost me 1000$
I used to brag to people at how amazing it was as it could replace almost 30 floppy disks.
You really think they allocate storage per user like allocated real estate per home owner?
deduplication + thin provisioning + compression applied to all that storage and your calculations are way off!
i know this would require different licensing deals but, assuming that most people will have similar collections of commercially available songs on their ipods, surely apple would not have to keep different instance of the same mater in each users imaginary allocated space.
just get apple to serve you music it knows that you own. admittedly this would stop working for totally individual content.
as a side note i have simply no idea if people actually get round to listening to the 10's of GB's of songs they have on their ipods! when your library total playtime is in years, you have too much music.
just get apple to serve you music it knows that you own. admittedly this would stop working for totally individual content.
as a side note i have simply no idea if people actually get round to listening to the 10's of GB's of songs they have on their ipods! when your library total playtime is in years, you have too much music.
For a while I mixed up exabyte and petabyte, so I thought a petabyte was 1024 exabytes which was 1024 terabytes. Now it makes sense.