When Apple first confirmed last year that they were building a server farm facility down in North Carolina, speculation was heavy that Cupertino was looking to get in big on cloud computing. Everything was moving to the cloud; soon there'd be no need for storing documents on your hard drive; the cloud was everything. So the arguments ran.

Well, people still save stuff to hard drives, external hard drives still sell at a decent clip, and we don't know anyone under the age of fifty without a flash drive (or three). Turns out physical ownership is kind of important to people. Is the cloud part of the Apple's plan?

For one thing, the plan does involve hiring. Apple's just posted ten positions up for those with the tech savvy to work their new Data Center. While they still have yet to find their Chief Operating Engineer, they're wasting no time trying to fill the lower level posts such as maintenance and electrical technicians. But the mystery still remains: what's it all about?

With the impending launch of the iPad and Apple still hard at work hammering out iTunes content deals, it looks like that early move was possibly laying the long-term groundwork for an expanded set of downloadable offerings. Since there are literally tons of places people store stuff already in the cloud (Flickr for photos, Google Docs for spreadsheets and text files, Imeem for music, etc.), what does Apple have that would make people flock to their cloud service as opposed to the ones they already use?

As Apple and television show producers move closer to deals, as book and magazine publishers act coy and pretend like they don't want to play nice with Apple, as the iPad girds its loins to be the one device to fill all your digital entertainment needs, there's going to have to be a place to store all that increased data and handle the massive increase in download requests. The hunger of Americans for entertainment is virtually insatiable.

Nothing like a bulked up server farm to handle that kind of surge, now is there?