Storage Technology In 2001.

MARK: Here we are in 2001, but there's no "Space Odyssey".

HAL: "I'm a HAL 9000 computer and I can sing a little song ... 'Daisy, Daisy, give me your...'"

MARK: I get it! But save it for the next office party.

HAL: You must have celebrated at the office, around the end of 2000, though. You won an award, didn't you? It was the "PRESStige" Award from Press Access--that's a LexisNexis company, isn't it?

MARK: Right. I was named "CEO's Choice for Technology". They told me what it means.

HAL: Do tell.

MARK: I was chosen by PR firms as--quoting their letter now: "the journalist by whom technology CEOs would most like to be covered."

HAL: As a founder of the Computer Press Association, I have to wonder about being flattered by the very people you're supposed to be covering.

MARK: As a member of the Computer Press Association, what else is new? Remember, marketing and PR people get the big bucks for knowing which editors it's worth their while to contact. And this was a "popular election." PR people had to fill out forms.

HAL: They didn't leave any pregnant chads, did they?

MARK: At least it didn't have to go to the Supreme Court! But excuse me for a moment while I go polish my ego.

HAL: Now that you're back, let's talk about storage technology in 2001.

MARK: I went to the Advanced Recording Media Conference in December, and optical--especially CD-RW--got considerable play. It hadn't ever been that prominent before. Didn't you note, in one of your recent columns, that CD-RW is taking away part of the market?

HAL: It's positioned to replace Zip at the low end.

MARK: Isn't Iomega focusing more attention on Zip?

HAL: They'll never give it up--they've just introduced a digital-photo reader/writer that uses 250MB Zip media and links directly to some printers.

MARK: That doesn't sound like a killer-app.

HAL: I agree. And in any case, Iomega is also OEM'ing a CD-RW drive. They know which side of the bread the butter's on.

MARK: Do you think CD-RW will impact DVD-RAM?

HAL: So far, at least, the price-points are too far apart. CD-RW is half the price of DVD-RAM, and there's a reader--at least--for CDs in every computer. DVD-RAM disks still can't be read by most DVD-ROM drives.

MARK: That's where Pioneer has a window of opportunity. Their rewritable DVD-RW is supposed to be readable in DVD-ROM drives and DVD-Video players.

HAL: But the DVD-RW writer is a $2,500 investment. Not exactly where you'd position something if you wanted to create a mass market.

MARK: Does that mean that DVD will continue to lag in the optical race?

HAL: It will certainly take over from MO, anywhere that there isn't a legacy of MO disks. A DVD-RAM jukebox is much cheaper--and actually stores more data for any given number of disks--than an MO jukebox of comparable size.

MARK: The words to conjure with are "high availability." Who's got the edge--not in absolute capacity but in file retrieval speed?

HAL: MO is slightly faster, at least as a reader. But I don't think the difference is that great when you consider the cost factor. Look at how many users migrated from MO to tape systems, over the past five years, while tape was leaping over optical disks in almost every spec.

MARK: Be careful or the "Tape Is Dead" prophets will burn you in effigy.

HAL: I may favor optical disks, but I'd never say "tape is dead". It's always going to offer the lowest media price per-megabyte in this business.

MARK: I agree, but for an increasing number of applications, especially in document or image management, optical has a present and--I believe-- growing appeal.

HAL: No argument there. But look at a real-world situation. Suppose I'm a customer-support rep, and you phone in with a query. You give me your name right away, and I start searching for your records. But while the jukebox is retrieving it--tape or disk, it doesn't matter--my instructions are to chat you up, ask you how you like our products, how you heard about them, and so on. That way, you don't notice the time-lag, and by the time I'm ready to ask you the important questions, your file is on my screen.

MARK: Hal, in that example, you've forgotten the famous phrase "hierarchical storage management". In many cases, the transfer rates of the media are less important than the ability to locate a specific file as fast as possible.

HAL: That's a function of indexing--not necessarily of spin rates or data transfer rates.

MARK: Give that man a blue ribbon! In the early 1990s, HSM got a bad rep for being too complex to use in networks, as opposed to mainframe environments. But the current explosion of data is bringing HSM back in disguise: it's called "data migration" now, and it's essential to "storage virtualization". Your help-desk guy could cut that stalling time with intelligent data migration--not merely by employing the right kind of hardware.

HAL: I'm confused about "storage virtualization", though. Maybe our readers can enlighten me. If you can visualize "storage virtualization", email me at [e-mail].

MARK: And if you think I'm right--that knowing where your data is is the key to retrieving it quickly, email me at [e-mail].