What does Apple’s 12 petabyte purchase from EMC unit Isilon Systems say about the company’s real view of hard drives?
It says that they are true believers in the technology as a means to grow their business long-term. Dating back to the launch of the iPad, MacBook Air, iPad2 and Apple’s decision to not include a hard drive in any of these solutions led many analysts and media to speculate on the ultimate demise of the hard drive. When in all actuality, Amazon’s Cloud Drive, and Apple’s rumored iTunes data center being built in North Carolina tells us that the hard drive is alive and well, and a huge catalyst for these companies’ long term expansion plans. There is no way Amazon or Apple could embark on a cloud-based delivery of music, video, photos, (anything) without hard drives and the cost and capacity economies of scale they offer.
This begs the question…with the tablet craze and the continued growth of smartphones (devices that are free of hard drives), together with the ambitious investment in the cloud, what does the future of the hard drive really look like? What if everybody moved all of their data from local storage to the cloud?
I’ll cover that in one of my next posts…
Related Posts:
Cloud music and the cost of convenience
UltraViolet’s digital lockers in the sky
Storage [Infographic]: Data Defined
[Infographic] The Cloud today
When it comes to Apple’s iPad competition, could storage be a differentiator?
The death of the hard drive? C’mon people
Image by: http://www.cloudfocus.org
wow, that’s no joke!
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