Microsoft Tap Dances Until 2000 - PC Expo - Industry Trend or Event

Computer Technology Review, August, 1999 by Joshua Piven

This spring's PC Expo in New York might be characterized as more directional than innovative. Numerous companies announced product and business strategies and new distribution programs, while relatively few were showing groundbreaking new technology. And even those companies which did roll out new products were somewhat eclipsed by Microsoft's massive campaign to get all of its version 2000 products out the door. Still, digging deep has its rewards, and the following presents a somewhat jaundiced view of several of the new technologies that lurked just below the surface of the steamy greenhouse known as the Javitz Center.

IBM introduced a broad SAN strategy, one which includes new products, a road map for future SAN hardware and software, a new testing center, and an interoperability commitment. Big Blue rolled out Netfinity and NT-based SAN solutions, including a SAN-optimized enterprise server for the datacenter that supports up to eight 550MHz Pentium III processors. The company's Tivoli division said that, starting in Q3 1999, its SAN solution will include both multi-vendor tape pooling and LAN-free backup, with future (read: early next year) enhancements to include server less backup, disk pooling, and data sharing. IBM also announced that next year, its entire line of AS/400e servers will be SAN-ready.

At the show, IBM introduced new SAN Fibre Channel fabric hardware, including an 8 and 16 port Fibre Channel Switch and SAN Data Gateway Services to help enterprises manage their storage solutions. IBM is supporting efforts to make all major relational databases SAN-ready, and Big Blue also plans to establish a storage solution interoperability lab at the National Testing Center in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The company hopes to use its experience with ESCON to help it make FICON the interoperability standard in the enterprise SAN market. IBM said that all of its SAN products will be compliant with future SNIA standards, some of which are expected later this year.

Iomega Shows Zip

Storage maven Iomega has decided to enter the rough-and-tumble optical storage market with its new ZipCD drive, which company officials indicated will ship later this year, likely early this half. The internal ATAPI 4x4x24 CD-RW drive is a significant departure for a company that has made its reputation primarily on external, easy to install, easy to use Zip and Jaz drives. While installing an internal optical drive has gotten easier--and the company will provide an onscreen animated tutorial with the unit--it does require the dreaded "case crack," something inexperienced users often seek to avoid. Since ZipCD will ship initially only as an internal drive--and will be sold through retail channels, not to OEMs--Iomega seems to be targeting power and semi-power users with its optical drive.

But the drive is not the only story. While Iomega will bundle Adaptec's DirectCD and EasyCD Creator to help users burn CDs, the drive will also include Iomega's new QuikSync software, which performs interventionless CD backup when user-defined files are saved to the hard disk. (QuikSync will also be a free download and can be used with all Iomega removable media drives.)

In interviews, several Iomega officials said that the company's market research has indicated that users want an easy way to back up frequently used data such as documents, email messages, and audio files. However, they acknowledged that while backing up word processing and audio files is relatively simple, doing the same for email is more complicated. Most email programs use a combination of data and TOC files to display data, and users would have to be fairly knowledgeable on the workings of their email applications (and the location of files) to backup email messages.

Iomega is marketing QuikSync as an enterprise solution, one which allows corporate users to back up their own PCs, thus removing the burden from IT. "We're changing the way we support enterprise customers," says Bill Hake, Iomega's VP of worldwide OEM sales and Americas sales and marketing. "Providing the best portable storage solutions for the enterprise means delivering high-quality product services and listening and reacting to the needs of enterprise users." Iomega also intends to sell 3-packs of both non-formatted and formatted CDs, with the latter demanding a slight price premium.

Iomega may have heard calls for QuikSync from enterprise users, but somehow I doubt that IT was demanding that end users begin archiving their own hard drives. Such a process represents a new layer of complexity for IT managers to worry about, including data integrity, version control, and privacy issues. There's a reason why most corporate PCs don't have tape drives: archival and backup procedures are generally done over the network to make administration and management easier. Iomega has also just begun shipping the PC Card drive version of its Clik! 40MB product. Pricing is about $200, and media is about $10 when purchased in 10-packs.

Toshiba rolled out a new version of its DVD-RAM drive, the SD-Wlll, which now includes 2MB of cache for faster transfer rates. The drive reads and writes DVD-RAM media at 1,350Kbps, reads DVD-ROM media at 2,700Kbps (2,400Kbps for CD-ROM). Burst transfer in SCSI synchronous mode can reach 20Mbit/sec. The drive is priced at $599 in OEM quantities. While I am prohibited from publishing the details until the fall, I was briefed on a brand new CD-RW drive with technology which the company expects to revolutionize the rewritable drive market and spur adoption rates. Look for details in the September issue.