EMedia Professional - The Editor's Spin, April 1997

The Desktop Jukebox: Nothing but Network?

David R. Guenette

EMedia Professional, April 1997
Copyright © Online Inc.

We've been questioning the leading CD-ROM networking/server/tower/jukebox companies about the "desktop jukebox" for some time. We start with a recitation of CD audio products--from Sony, Pioneer, Akai, and Fisher, to name less than half the consumer electronics companies now making the things--that provide storage capacities of between 24 and 100 music discs for street prices as low as $150, available at any Circuit City or Sears department store. If such mechanisms for storing and swapping discs can be so inexpensive to make, we've found ourselves hypothesizing, then how long will it be until this kind of mechanism is applied to the CD-ROM market? Of course, prices would be bound to run higher, for the SCSI support and the software needed to make managing dozens of CD-ROM titles bearable, at a minimum, but the key question remains: When will the $1000 desktop jukebox make an appearance?

We've gotten a lot of different answers from a lot of different companies. Some say that the corporate markets that make up the current buyers of high-end CD-ROM towers, jukeboxes, and servers wouldn't have much interest in devices with low MTBF, even if the devices were to be cheap. Vendors serving MIS departments, for instance, understand that the customer priorities put a system's robustness and reliability before price. After all, if your mission-critical CD-ROM network keeps going down because you've jury-rigged a home audio jukebox to it, the $15,000 you might have saved looks like money better spent.

Indeed, depending on the model and on just when you purchased a CD-ROM jukebox, even $15,000 could have been cheap. Pioneer New Media Technologies, Inc.'s DRM-5002R2W lists for $23,995, for example, even as it comes laden with a 500-disc capacity, two quad speed readers, and two quad speed CD-Recordable drives. The 100-disc magazine itself for the DRM-5004X line, at $295, costs as much as a Sony 100-disc CD-Audio jukebox on sale at Lechmere last weekend.

Prices for CD-ROM jukeboxes are coming down, however. Cygnet Storage Solutions, Inc. recently announced its Infinidisc Robotic CD Library, which offers a 500,000 MEBF rating (Mean Exchanges Before Failure; which describes, ironically, how well the mechanisms behave, not how boorishly) and modular upgradability from 250 to 500 discs and from two to eight CD drives. Add software support by the likes of Smart Storage Inc., OTG Software, and Celerity, with suggested list pricing starting at $9995 for a two-drive and 250-disc configuration, and price is approachable for a lot of companies.

CD-ROM towers present another active area--both in terms of price drops and in terms of capacity--for those who want access to a lot of discs fast. A couple of months ago, SciNet introduced the SciNet Series 400 CD-Server, an independent CD-ROM server, which, according to the company, is preconfigured to install in under five minutes; one model has four CD-ROM drives and a second accommodates ten CDs--two CD-ROM drives, and two four-disc changers. The Series 400 supports up to 25 users simultaneously and contains a 486DX2-66 processor running a 32-bit environment that can connect to standard Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, or Token Ring in Novell NetWare or Windows NT environments, all for prices of $1795 for the four-CD unit, and $2495 for the ten-CD unit. Smart and Friendly recently released an 8X drive tower that goes for under $2000 for the five-drive version, which includes Ornetix's CD Vision and CD Commander disc management software and a ten-user version of MediaPath's disc management tool MediaAgent. And then there are companies like Boffin, which creates towers using seven of Nakamichi's terrific four-disc minichanger drives, to provide access within two seconds to any of the 28 discs nearline and online, fully loaded, for under $5000.

But what about the desktop jukebox, where power users, small businesses, and standalone departments might gain access to hundreds of discs? Denon, known for its audio equipment, is the first out with a 200-disc jukebox for CD-ROM, complete with SCSI-2 interfaces for under $5000. Plextor, a premium CD-ROM drive maker, fits out the same mechanism with its own 8X drives; Computability sells the Plextor MegaPleX for $4149. Elms Systems Corporation just exploded on the scene with its Digital Versatile Library (DVL), a $5000, 100-disc jukebox that comes with Elms' Panorama, an "Explorer-like" software management interface; add a CD-R device among the DVL's four drive bays, and you can be making the discs you'll need to access.

Expect to see "desktop jukeboxes" in the sub-$2000 range, maybe even before the end of 1997. And why not? Read and write drives are dirt cheap, and networking is largely built into the OS these days. The biggest roadblock is titles, but with CD-R and CD-RW, the small office will have these right in the jukebox and be tearing through media like there was no shortage of places to put them.

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