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The WAVE Report on Digital Media
3D --- Media Creation --- Shared Space ---Published by 4th Wave, Inc.--- Issue #0703------------------2/9/07 |
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0703.1 Storage Visions 2007
By John Latta
Las Vegas, NV
January 6-7, 2007
Storage Visions 2007
The Coughlin Associates puts on Storage Visions. The conference “focuses on the role of digital storage in the creation, distribution and reception of entertainment content.” Further, the conference addresses a wide range of technologies which impact consumers. There are approximately 400 in attendance. Most of the speakers give presentations that were well organized. Thus, there is an abundance of interesting materials presented each session.
Future of Consumer Digital Storage
Tom Coughlin provided an interesting perspective of the market dynamics around consumer digital storage. Key points made include.
By the next decade there
will be more personal than
commercial content stored. This will create new markets
and
opportunities to serve those markets.
The consumer will be driving new storage technologies.
There is no limit to the demand for storage.
By 2015 there will be:
A
terabyte in your pocket
A petabyte in your home
Exabytes in datacenters
and
Zetabytes in the world
New modes of information
sharing will drive the market.
Early indications of this include:
Social
networking
Second Life
YouTube and similar
Peer to Peer
New means of bring people
and ideas together, such as
common interest engines.
Customers do not buy just
faster processors or more storage
anymore.
Trends driving CE include:
Mass
customization
More niche products
As an illustration of this
look for the emergence of Life
Logs or Personal Memory Assistants (PMA). This will
allow us
to access our own histories or friends or relatives
histories. We can even find things we lost.
In conjunction with the
massive storage required there would
have to be the ability to index, organize and manage
the
information. There will be a massive growth of metadata
in
personal content. This will lead to intelligent storage
systems.
By 2010 it is estimated
that there will be in each home 2TB
of personal reference data and 2.5TB of home commercial
content. But by 2015 this will explode due to life
logs and
personal content generation. It is estimated that
personal
content will rise to 100TB with commercial content
being
only a few TB.
The home personal storage
network will have a pivotal role.
This will integrate the home backup storage, wireless
automobile, wireless mobile devices, home media storage,
remote backup storage and content stored on home computers.
Other Presentations
10’ Experience– television
2’ Experience – PC
12” Experience – iPod
Milk Experience – Screen refrigerator
Andrei Khurshodov, Segate, addressed the need for long term archival storage on disk drives. There is significantly expanding long term disk storage applications which range from CE to security. The environment that these hard drives can be kept in range from an unheated garage to climate controlled vault. Segate is engaged in a “Design for Storage Program” which is to understand the environmental effects, reliability prediction model, develop accelerated storage test methodology and recommendation for long term storage conditions.
Jim Handy of Objective Analysis using an analysis of Flash and HD disk pricing predicted that Flash is unable to replace HDD in PCs. But that Flash would replace CD-R in 2007, DVD-R in 2009, HD-DVD in 2010 and Blu-Ray in 2011.
Wayne Desmond of Sony reviewed the latest video tape technology – AIT-5. For the tape the size of a 8mm tape cartridge the specs are:
400TB capacity
24MB/s transfer rate
3.5” form factor
Evolution of Storage for Entertainment
Jerry Pierce, SVP Technology, Universal Pictures gave an excellent keynote. Some of the main points included.
The production technology
for movie creation has slowly
changed. This includes the following time frames:
1900 – 2005 – Film
Centric
2005 – 20?? – Hybrid
Film and Digital
20?? – Digital
Only
The major changes have happened
in the home. The iPod has
transformed both the music industry and how consumer
purchase and consume music. In the image entertainment
industry there is a lot going on but no common organization.
Consumers are seeking to have entertainment content
any
time, any place on any device.
The new visual entertainment
includes: TV, movies, Games and
Internet. The home video business model is showing
interesting trends with what iPod is doing and Microsoft
with xBox 360.
Jerry described an evening
watching entertainment with his
23 year old daughter. They ended up watching 9 content
sources of which only 2 were purchased media and 3
were from
YouTube. He regards this as today’s state of
media as seen
by consumers.
From this he made these observations:
Consumers
are becoming their own programmers;
It is essential to have
acceptable audio quality
There is no consistent
experience
Content comes from
all directions and much of it is
free
I need a keyboard to
find free entertainment
Hard Drives are the 2nd Largest Technology Product
Hard drives are behind cell phones in quantity produced. We spoke with a vendor that ships suspensions mechanisms, the arms which hold the drive heads, which has approximately 50% market share. They ship approximately 15 – 20m units per week. This would put the number of HDD per year between 1.5B to 2.0B. Hitachi spoke, which includes the prior IBM disk drive operations, that for many years they had hoped that the consumer market would open to the consumer. This began in 2003 and we are in a major transition on the role of HDD in CE. In their positioning of the 1TB drive, announced just before the event, this covers a wide market of which retail is a significant portion.
Other Presentation Highlights
The coming implementation of security on hard drives was addressed in several talks. The emphasis was that user transparent features would come to market in 2007. This is driven, in part, by the increasing number of the theft or loss of computers with sensitive data. The focus of the presentations was on the implementation of the recommendations of the TCG (Trusted Computing Group). Mike McKean of STMicroelectronics gave a presentation on the silicon support of secure hard drives. It is the mobile, desktop and CE markets which are leading the deployment of secure hard drives. He stated that TPM support will be present in Vista in 2H07 in an upcoming service pack. TCG compliant silicon will be available in 2007.
Agere made a presentation on BluOnyz which is a mobile content server. The size is approximately that of a credit card, can be carried in one’s pocket and has storage capacity of from 1GB to 40GB. Good looking ID but no display. Runs Linux and has connectivity via Bluetooth, Wifi, SD and USB. This design is available to OEMs.
Sanyo predicted that iVDR is taking off. First seen by The WAVE at CEATEC this is a removable hard drive. There are multiple form factors supported: 3.5”, 1.8” and 1”. Each one also has a secure version which protects the content.
Hitachi’s, John Osterhout provided a market overview of the HDD business. He stated that by 2010 the CE and external shipments of HDD will be about as large as the total HDD market in 2005. The consumer era of HDD began in 2003 and was accelerated by the iPod use of a drive. An example was shown where the average home has 10+ HDDs. The just announced 1TB drive has wide application. This is the first desktop drive with perpendicular magnetic recording technology. The suggested price point is $399.95.
Flash was discussed by several speakers. Most focused on one topic – when the cost per MB of Flash was the same as a HDD – the magic cross over point. The only other justification for use was form factor – Flash made possible designs that could not be done with HDD. Two examples cited were the iPod Nano and the Motorola Razr.
A panel was held on Flash and HDD’s: Where is the Cache? This was a debate on the Intel Robinson technology vs. putting Flash within the HDD. Intel was not on the panel to defend its position. The HDD companies leaned to making the hard drive the place for including the flash on the drive.
Maureen Weber, HP, outlined its vision for home network storage. The vision is “Easy backup and access to content from anywhere.” The category was stated to evolve to a home media server. One came away with the impression that HP owns this category but this seemed inconsistent with the Microsoft announcement of the Windows Home Server a few hours later. In response to a question from The WAVE Report Maureen stated that the justification of a home server for backup over products such as its own media vault, would happen when consumers got away from only thinking about cost/GB.
Silicon Image made the case for its SteelVine HDD virtualization engine. This chip allows for many drives to be added with the appearance of a single aggregate drive. The technology supports RAID, auto drive locking and automatic backup.
Allen Buckner, HP gave an interesting home test case to illustrate some of the issues which need to be overcome for the use of media in the home. This involved asking his wife to handle media on a PC and on a connected entertainment center, based on an xBox. The tasks included: listen to a song, view a photo, watch a home movie, watch movies and playback a TV recorded program. DRM represented a significant barrier and just the handling of files from the PC onto the entertainment center.
WAVE Comments
We often think of processing power as an enabler while battery technology is just the opposite – a market retard. But Storage Visions made clear that increasingly new consumer applications are surfacing because of storage. This includes the iPod, PVR and automotive applications. The play between Flash and HDD, at the product level, is about form and use environment. We would almost call giddy the prospect of new applications such as a life log. What Storage Visions surfaced is that storage technology advancement makes possible many new personal applications. Many have not been conceived of yet – we just have not thought about how to use a Petabyte.
There is this myopic fixation on commercial content. The thinking is that consumers only care about movies and recorded audio. The Digital Living Room conference, approximately 12 months ago, ignored personal content. Storage Visions took a much longer range view and predicted that within 10 years personal content would exceed commercial. With the market success of digital cameras and Youtube these have shown that content created by individuals is important. Storage technology enables this and it brings a shift in the market of how users see content storage and use.
With rising quantities of personal content the most reliable source of metadata is ones memory of what was collected and when. This form of metadata storage is unsustainable as the market shifts due to vastly larger stores of personal content. Only passing attention was paid to this at Storage Visions. One speaker stated that it may be necessary to have metadata logged with every video frame. Another described the prospect of an exponential rise in metadata. Metadata is seen as critical to enable rapid query and access to personal data. Even Google and Youtube have not solved the video search problem. Just think of a query request to a 10 year life log that might go like this “…when did I last see Jane?”
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