The mass storage industry is abuzz about the potential for the NC (Network Computer) which has been bandied about lately by Oracle, IBM, Apple, Sun and others. What has everybody's hopes up is that the original vision from Oracle's Larry Ellison had the system with no mass storage. Does he think that everybody is going to keep their Quicken files on a remote server somewhere? Of course everybody knows that no network is ever violated so its an obvious place to keep all of your financial records. The IRS would understand if they all got lost because of remote server failure.
SyQuest has gotten rather busy in the past few weeks, what with an almost total management shake up and then the introduction of the $299 EZFlyer 230. The company, now in a catch up role to Iomega's Zip drive as the removable media of choice also reduced the price of its EZ135 from $249 to $119.95. Wonder why it took them a week after the EZFlyer intro to do so?
Speaking of Iomega, executives there have to be quite happy about recent events. Packard Bell and Acer give endorsements and then a week later IBM announces that it will start shipping models with the Zip drive in some of its most current systems. IBM execs went so far as to say that demand form its customer base is what decided the computer manufacturer to include ZIP drives in the systems. All this while Iomega is in a silent period before a secondary stock offerings which at least means it will be a week or so before we hear them crow about all of this. However with hard drives in desktop systems starting to nose into the 3G-byte range, it's about time that the capacities for these portable devices increased.
Anybody notice that 3M is starting to get serious about storage. While the company has made media for devices for a while, the company is planning to form a new group focused on the PC industry? IBM has signed an OEM agreement with Storage Technology Corp. which will expand the breadth of IBM's disk storage products. Storage Technology will be manufacturing as an IBM branded product subsystems that it had sold under the names of Iceberg, Kodiak and Arctic Fox. IBM, with its infallible ear for a good product name, will change the names to IBM RAMAC Virtual Array Storage, IBM RAMAC Scalable Array Storage and IBM RAMAC Electronic Array Storage. Storage Technology intends to use IBM as its main distribution channel beginning in July.
For those who have been waiting for the computer device that sets you apart from the rest of the pack, how about Sony's latest CD-ROM recordable solution. Not every computer hacker masters their own disks after all. The latest Spressa CD-R 940 drives use a new file system so that the drives can be used on the desktop as a floppy or a CD-ROM. With 650M-bytes space on each disk this could be the answer to many problems, if only it was not named after the first coffee machine to make expresso.