This story is still developing, but it looks like Apple has ordered over 12 petabytes of data from Isilon Systems—the newest acquired division of EMC—for their iTunes service. It’s suspected that the gigantic amount of storage is going to be allocated for video storage for their customers.

This news via StorageNewsletter.com speaking from an inside source,

Apple ordered as much as 12PB of capacity from Isilon Systems, notably to manage the video download of its customers using iTunes, according to an inside source of the new division of EMC.

It’s probably the largest of its 1,500 customers recorded at the end of December, including 20% in Europe.

The acquisition of Isilon has gone well for EMC after they purchased the new division last year in November for $2B. They have numerous customers who use gigantic amounts of storage including Alcatel-Lucent, Arizona State University, DailyMotion, MySpace, Second Life, University of Michigan, and even the US Geological Survey (USGS).

Rumors currently suggest that the giant purchase of storage by Apple may be for the construction of a giant data center in Maiden, North Carolina. This new facility would be relegated to provide resources for iTunes and cloud-storage for their video products—which they currently provide a catalogue of over 14 million songs worldwide, over 3 thousand TV shows, and over 2.5 thousand movies. Many of these movies and TV shows will be presented in HD (1080p) which takes a great deal of storage and bandwidth capability, which Isilon is excellently positioned to deliver.

Of course, there’s always the chance that this is the beginning of Apple’s reply to the forays that Amazon and Google have been making into allowing users to upload their music into cloud-storage and in order to enable them to play their music anywhere. Amazon has their Cloud Drive locker service; and Google may be running with their own cloud-based music locker to go alongside updates to their Android 3.0 music app.

As Amazon and Google push this envelope, Apple should be giving them the hairy-eyeball because this is precisely the sort of service that iTunes would want to provide to consumers. A gigantic chunk of the music-streaming market plays through mobile phones, as leveraged by Pandora and other services.