Post-Comdex.

Welcome back from stress city

Mark: I'm just back from Comdex. Do we have a president yet?

Hal: By the time this gets into print, we'd better!

Mark: Nobody with any sense wants the job anyway. It's almost as stressful as being a trade journalist.

Hal: So let's consider something totally non-stressful. How was Comdex?

Mark: Stressful.

Hal: But seriously ....

Mark: Some interesting products showed their heads at the show. Products and directions. It was a good show for optical.

Hal: How so?

Mark: The DVD-RAM manufacturers had their own pavilion, with media-makers, software vendors, and jukebox companies.

Hal: Tell me about the software.

Mark: Do you remember those three terrible letters "H S M"?

Hal: Hierarchical Storage Management? What about it?

Mark: It's come back in disguise, calling itself "Data Migration," and aiming for the market space that's called "Storage Virtualization--"

Hal: Whoa! Buzzword alert!

Mark: There's no easy definition for it, but it means taking storage functions and making them transparent in an application environment. And HSM, if you will, is now the best example of that.

Hal: You mean, migrating storage to the most efficient medium for the purpose: short-term data to the HDD, archived data to tape, and so on. Right?

Mark: Right. One company is taking data not just hierarchically but "vertically" too.

Hal: You'll have to bring me up to speed on that one too. What's "vertical" storage management?

Mark: Instead of assigning data to a secondary or tertiary storage venue, you can take a "snapshot" of the data and handle your version-control functions right there in your primary storage venue.

Hal: Sounds cumbersome. Maybe the old ways are still best?

Mark: Oh, you antiquarian! But speaking of old technologies, Philips finally demonstrated DVD+RW, and told me that they have working evaluation units available.

Hal: I'm still skeptical. How many years is it, now, since they promised DVD+RW? Five, I think.

Mark: The whole presentation was strange. It seemed to be geared for a show like CES -- the Consumer Electronics Show. I think they're going after consumer applications, rather than business IT.

Hal: They're going to run headlong into Pioneer in THAT market. Pioneer's DVD-RW, which they plan to release in 2001, is a consumer product that's targeted as a VCR-replacement, and a companion product to those new HDD-based video recorders. Pioneer is convinced that ordinary folks with camcorder tapes and home-movies will also want to archive their images on disk. Is that what Philips was promoting?

Mark: Pretty much. In fact, all these video alternatives make me wonder if any of them will be easier to program than the old VCR with its flashing "12:00."

Hal: Didn't you see anything at Comdex that was genuinely new?

Mark: Most of Comdex was predictable. If anything can be called "new," it's where existing technologies got mated to new applications. For instance, DVD-RAM as the foundation for a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) device.

Hal: Ho hum.

Mark: It's intriguing. You think of HDDs as the heart of a NAS device. This could take DVD-RAM out of the offline side, where it's been used for archiving and backup, and put it into online storage.

Hal: I'm unclear on the concept: is it a DVD-RAM jukebox? One disk probably isn't enough storage capacity.

Mark: Quite right. It's a multi-disk device but with the added advantage of being easy to use. How often have optical devices been truly plug-and-play? This sure looked like it would be easy to connect up and start using.

Hal: What else did you see at Comdex?

Mark: The peripheral-interface wars are raging more violently than ever. There was Fibre Channel versus IP-based solutions, and arguments over which new technologies are "real" and which are merely "vapor." The rhetoric was flying high and heavy. This was also the Comdex where both the LTO consortium and Super DLT started fighting for mind-share.

Hal: Ahh, the great tape war! I guess that's back too.

Mark: Yup. There's no avoiding death, taxes, and tape-format conflicts. But I want to tell you about something I saw that's not storage-specific, but ii think is revolutionary. A company called YY Software Corp. showed an intelligent auto-response product for interactive customer service applications. It seemed to "understand" inquiries before responding. It apparently parses sentences, recognizes keywords -- even unusual variants of words and misspellings. I've never seen anything like it.

Hal: While you were marveling at that software, I wonder if you might have missed something of interest to our readers.

Mark: Let's ask them. Email me at [e-mail] if you saw something you'd like us to tell our readers about.

Hal: And email [e-mail]--if you know of something that SHOULD have been at Comdex but wasn't.