Apple Confirms the Approach of the iCloud

An aerial view of the new Apple data center in Maiden, North Carolina, excerpted by a new video by Bill Wagenseller.

Apple today confirmed that it will announce details for “iCloud, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering,” at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference next Monday. The announcement confirms the long-held assumption here at data Center Knowledge that th size of Apple’s new data center in North Carolina was a sure sign of a coming cloud offering. It also confirms that Apple has acquired the iCloud.com domain name for the service.

Apple offered no additional details on the iCloud service. It’s long been known that the new data center in North Carolina would support iTunes and MobileMe. The suspense has been whether those services would undergo a cloud transformation that would explain the enormous scale of the 500,000 square foot iDataCenter in North Carolina.

In recent weeks, Apple has added additional data center space in Silicon Valley to support a broadly-deployed. Most major Internet companies have major hubs on both coasts, which helps with content delivery and also provides the ability to keep copies of critical data “out of region” so that a single natural disaster wouldn’t threaten the survival of the data.

Want to know more about Apple’s data centers? See the Apple Data Center FAQ or check out some of our previous coverage:

• Where Apple’s ‘Secret Cloud’ Will Live
• Is an iTunes “Reboot” Driving the iDataCenter Project?
• The iDataCenter and the Cloud
• Maiden iDataCenter Will be 500,000 Square Feet
• The Apple-Google Data Center Corridor