I'm sure most of you already knew about the million song thing... anyway I was bored so I did some simple math...

First of all, Apple has around 250k songs in their collection right now... so...

5MB/song * 250,000 Songs = 1,250GB

Their collection is 1.25TeraBytes right now... you can build a server that handles that much for around $2,000 I think... anyway, moving along... they sold the million songs in a week... sooooo...

5MB/song * 1 Million Songs = 5TB = 40Tb
60Sec/Min * 60Min/Hr * 24Hr/Day * 7Day/Wk = 604,800Sec/Wk
40Tb/Wk = 66Mb/sec

Now remember... that 66Mbps is an average. Most likely they were sending down data much faster than that... to satisfy consumers with a quick download... hell... I'm sure a single XServe with its Gigabit interface can handle all the file downloading... after all, it is just dumbly sending bits down a pipe... the account systems will take a lot more horsepower tho. But I think apple uses the already-established Akamai network ... so that there is not one link to get saturated. BTW, the webpage says that a single XServe RAID will handle up to 2.52TB of data. More than twice the size of their current collection.

Anyway, just some nighttime rumiations... 'night everyone!