Video tour of Maxtor CentralAxis

Home storage: an alternative to home servers?

 

Here’s a video tour of the Maxtor CentralAxis from Seagate.  It’s an interesting alternative to a home server without the complexity. 

Centralized, intelligent home storage that plays content everywhere.  A candidate for Keeper of the Content in the home market?

Let’s hear from you…CentralAxis vs. a home server?

Giant sucking sound at CES

There’s storage behind almost every exciting innovation at CES 

 

It’s wild and crazy here at CES , but if you listen carefully, you can hear a giant sucking sound: massive storage being pulled by incredible new audio and visual consumer technology.  They’re mostly just incremental improvements on existing technology.  Their adoption will drive TBs of capacity to make them real. 

• Lots and lots of home theater systems  – from the high end (like Kaleidascape and XStreamHD) to the mainstream (MS Media Center, Home servers and many others).  All of them making it very easy to pull DVD collections and TV episodes in, requiring TBs per home.
• Bigger LCDs – which mean higher resolution.  It’s hard to see the difference between standard definition and HD on a 32″ TV.  But as TVs get really big (like the 150″ monster demoed by Panasonic), even HD isn’t enough.  Every resolution increase multiplies the size of the content being shown (and stored)

Windows Home Server – a channel storage play

A “no-brainer” central landing place for mushrooming home digital media 

Seagate announced today support for Microsoft’s Windows Home Server.  I’m excited because this product looks to create an easy landing place for the seemingly infinite digital media collecting in homes.  And Seagate’s got the storage products lined up to make WHS-based servers purr.  Check out our press release for more on this. 

Windows Home Server also looks to be a huge channel opportunity.  Unlike Xbox, Microsoft is letting others integrate the solutions.  HP and others are offering WHS-based devices, but you’ve got a window of opportunity (months? a year or two?) before WHS-based home servers are readily available in this relatively immature market.

Looks like an easy integration process.  You’re basically offering a storage-heavy PC-like system that sits on the home network.  It’s designed to be managed from existing PCs in the home, so you don’t need an additional keyboard and monitor. 

By outfitting the home server with 2 drives out of a possible 4 slots, you can give your customer enough capacity to meet current needs and position yourself as their “growth consultant”.  You leave them room to grow, which you can help them with over time with additional internal drives.  You can plug in external storage devices to expand further.

I’ve heard from people at Microsoft that limited-release versions of WHS sold out right away, with demand far beyond expectations. 

Polaroid and the Digital Home

“Easy” is a potent value proposition for Digital Home solutions 

Just heard Scott Hardy, EVP of the Product Group at Polaroid, speak at a BrandMatters event in Minneapolis. 

Turns out Polaroid is not quite dead yet. In fact, they’re feeling much better now, thank you.

Get this:  Five years after entering the LCD TV market, Polaroid is #4 in market share – ahead of Sony, Philips, Toshiba, Panasonic.  If you’ve missed their rebirth as a mid-tier consumer electronics brand, you better pay attention.  They’re going after the Digital Home market in a big way.

Takeaways from Scott:

• By 2009, the average consumer will have over 5 terabytes of personal and commercial content in their home.
• That content is out of control, in a disconnected household.
• Polaroid is harvesting their legacy instant film business and investing in Digital Imaging and Digital Lifestyle businesses to go after this segment.
• They are targeting the Home Server space with Freescape, to provide a simpler solution than Microsoft Home Server and PC-based central home storage.  These are plug-and-play retail solutions that are very compelling.  Don’t see it on the web – could be a yet-to-be launched product line.
• Unique product available now: Photokeeper an external hard drive that plugs into your computer and automatically sucks all the photos out to back up every photo on your PC.

Interesting storage solutions coming from a different direction and perspective than PC and storage players. 

I still think a data-centric view like Seagate has is a better solution than a view-centric one like Polaroid’s, but in the retail space it could strike a nerve.