What connects Isilon, Avatar & Apple ?

Before I start on this subject there is this vital information I would like to share and we all will see how this helps in understanding the depth of what I am going to discuss.
1 Terabyte = 1,024 GB (gigabytes)
1 Petabyte = 1,000 Terabytes

I know in our daily computational life these numbers are just beyond imagination and hard to comprehend but believe me this is nothing, absolutely nothing and we will see that in a short while.

Now back to the topic that I am going to discuss - what connects Isilon, Avatar and Apple? Well please don’t consider Isilon to be another moon (just like Pandora) of the fictitious planet Polyphemus created by the genius James Cameron for his mega blockbluster Avatar, nor is Isilon one of the alien species shown in the movie Avatar. Isilon is the name of the storage company which deals in creating the super cool clustered storage systems and got acquired by EMC (one of the pioneers of the storage technology) last fall. Seattle based Isilon is the leader in the scalable NAS (network attached storage) and fairly advanced than SAN (storage area network).

Isilon & Avatar:
It came to my notice recently that James Camerson’s Lightstorm Entertainment was one of the early adopters of Isilon and they were one of the primary customers of this storage company. In fact James Cameron and Jon Landau (the producer of Avatar) were so impressed by the functionality offered by Isilon that they look no further when it comes to making the decision to choose the storage to dump the unfathomable data they were going to generate during the making of Avatar. The massive production of Avatar generated terabytes of data on weekly and at times on daily basis and James and Jon were looking for some solution that is scalable, efficient and cutting edge and Isilon answered.

Isilon & Apple:
I guess we all know how busy Apple is preparing to move its iTunes into the cloud and some of us are anxiously waiting for that. Well it seems Apple also picks Isilon to provide the storage for its upcoming cloud services. The news came out on April 6th that Apple is planning to buy some 12 petabytes of storage from Isilon for this project of migrating iTunes into the cloud. More details about this can be found here. 12 petabytes seems to be a large chunk of storage and sure Apple will need that. But after doing some research on the internet and specially on wikipedia I came to know that 12 petabytes is not that big of a storage space. Well I might be out of my mind but here is the information what others have been using and why 12 petabytes is nothing considering the size and reputation of someone who is non other than Apple.

• Teradata Database 12 has a capacity of 50 petabytes of compressed data.
• Google processes about 24 petabytes of data per day.
• The BBC's iplayer is reported to use 7 petabytes of bandwidth each month
• AT&T has about 19 petabytes of data transferred through their networks each day
• The 4 experiments in the Large Hadron Collider will produce about 15 petabytes of data per year, which will be distributed over the LHC Computing Grid
• The Hippocampus of a human adult brain has been estimated to store a limit of up to 2.5 petabytes of binary data equivalent
• The German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) has a storage capacity of 60 petabytes of climate data
• The Internet Archive contains about 3 petabytes of data, and is growing at the rate of about 100 terabytes per month as of March, 2009
• Games: World of Warcraft uses 1.3 petabytes of storage to maintain its game.Valve Steam delivers over 30 petabytes of content monthly
• The 2009 movie Avatar is reported to have taken over 1 petabyte of local storage at Weta Digital for the rendering of the 3D CGI effects

I bet you are pretty amazed by seeing the power and flow and storage of information. Well guess what my friend this is just the beginning. I will shutup and would like to point you to another amazing piece of information as far as storage is concerned. Go to here and find out who is the big daddy of this era of digital storage consumption. Feel free to pinch yourself as I guess you need to.