Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Apple's upcoming Cloud?


It is rumoured that a new 300,000 square metre data centre will be built adjacent to Apple's current 50,000m2, $1 billion centre in North Carolina.
Something revolutionary in global communications is brewing.

Apple bought the domain iCloud.com from Swedish software company Xcerion, for a rumoured $4.5 million. Xcerion has since renamed themselves CloudMe.

Apple will most likely launch iCloud as a music service to compete with Amazon's 'cloud locker' system. This means that you could store all your music in the 'cloud' and access it anytime, rather that store music on a iPhone or computer disk.
Indeed, you could store any digital files and have it always accessible.

Apple is not without competitors. Amazon's current service is moderately popular, and Google has been testng a simlar service on their Android OS devices.

So, whoever you choose, you will have your files with you wherever you go.

But, these services will not be limited to just streaming music. Think of what a ultra portable laptop like a MacBook Air would be capable of, connected to a virtual hard of terabytes, petabytes and even exabytes.

Apple last month bought 12 petabytes of storage space from Isilon Systems. If that is part of the future of the North Carolina complex, iCloud will be about much more than iTunes. One petabyte is capable of holding about 13 years of high definition video. The 10 billion photos on Facebook take up 1.5 petabytes, although Google processes 20 petabytes each day.

Many people already use cloud based services, such as Evernote, Dropbox and others. Why not store everything there, protected from power surges, system crashes and even viruses in super-secure data centres?

If this is the future of computing, I for one, am interested to see how it all turns out.

11 comments:

  1. Clouds just a fancy stupid marketing term for a bunch of servers.

    bad things about this being your files are on their servers so whatever you do is recorded and known.

    if they crash (which has already happened) all your data is either deleted or unavalible.

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  2. That's true, but hard drives crash too.
    If you synced your computers files with a server, you would have the best of both worlds.

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  3. interesting. Looking forward to when it comes out.

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  4. Looks good mate.

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  5. Don't know how I feel about cloud computing. I can see it's benefits but I just don't trust it yet.

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  6. doesnt change much

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  7. wow. they've really been thrifty with their cash spending that much money on a domain name. i've been using remote storage services like google docs and i can say they're not fool proof. i'm sure they have emergency backup systems to protect them from any eventuality, but there's much more problems like that like censorship, and some servers/addresses are blocked in certain countries. so it's not all rosy as it's made out to be.

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  8. Man, I wish I'd had the foresight to buy icloud.com a few years back!

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  9. Meh, I don't have any kind of apple products and I will likely not ever have one. This is kinda moot to me.

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  10. I have better-shaped clouds on my blog, check it out OK?

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