07.27.05EMC Raps Storage Arrays With DMX-3
By
David UtterThe company announced its largest and fastest storage solution on Monday, the Symmetrix DMX-3.
Through scaling, EMC said in a press release the DMX-3 storage array can retain
up to one
petabyte of data. That would
be the equivalent of 250 million digital songs.
The lower cost of disk drives has contributed to the development of the DMX-3 system. EMC claims its greater internal bandwidth and new memory technology will let users replace existing platforms with the system.
Additional drives can be added to the array, in what EMC describes as pay-as-you-go economics. Today, the system can support up to 960 drives. That figure will increase to 1,920 in 2006, and then to 2,000 later that year.
Those supported drives will include low-cost Fibre Channel disk drives.
Fibre
Channel technology was developed to deliver SCSI traffic from servers to disk
arrays, and to do so more quickly than other technologies.
EMC expects the DMX-3 to begin shipping in September, with low-cost FC drives
becoming available in early 2006.
Studios Offer No Guidance On DVD Battle
By
David Utter
The future of high-definition blue-laser DVDs will happen, but competing standards
make the future a little less clear.
One standard for blue laser DVDs, called Blu-ray, has support from Sony and Disney. It will be part of next year's PlayStation 3 release, and holds the most data. With ten times the storage of existing DVDs, Sony thinks Blu-ray will deliver better on future high-definition content and interactive features.
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Another standard, HD DVD, developed by Toshiba and supported by Warner Brothers,
Universal, and Paramount, offers almost as much capacity as Blu-ray. But its technology
offers an easier entry to market as existing DVD makers can upgrade their processes
to manufacture HD DVDs.
Forget about the studios having any influence on the discussion. During a Los Angeles home entertainment conference, Hollywood studio executives rebuffed a question on their influence in breaking the three year old deadlock. Paramount home entertainment president Thomas Lesinski said it would be "counterproductive" to comment on those talks, according to the New York Times.
The response hung in the air like a gunshot. But the question remained unanswered,
probably because there is no answer. With both Sony and Toshiba not backing down
to find a compromise, Hollywood has found itself having no influence on the discussion.
Although the HD DVD supporters have 89 movies scheduled for fourth quarter release, they may find consumers unwilling to be early adopters of what will be high priced HD DVD players, possibly in the $1,000 range.
Minimal HD DVD adoption would be very bad news for the studios. With theater ticket sales performing poorly, DVD releases have been where Hollywood makes its money on films. In the face of endless gas price increases and an estimated 80 percent home penetration of existing DVD players, Hollywood is going to find pushing early adoption of new blue laser DVD players difficult.
Getting two standards into households just doesn't look like it is going to happen.
