Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 10:29:54 -0400 From: "Daniel Mainguy" <mainguy@total.net> To: <www@freeBSD.org> Subject: PCD Press Release Message-ID: <000801beb285$f2b38b80$4f24d2d8@mainguy>
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TO THE EDITORS Free BSD I have a news item, in the enclosed press release, about a NEW TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF DATA STORAGE. I believe this story would be of interest to your readers who are leaders in the field of Information Technology. Please accept my best regards, Louis Conrad. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE A technology that could greatly reduce the cost of online storage is available for licensing. With the need for information storage increasing exponentially with the popularity of the Internet,a start-up has patented and is now offering for licensing a piece of hardware that could translate into reduced costs for enterprise storage. Briefly, the product called "PCD", an acronym for "Processor of Convergent Data" which is a nice way of saying that it manages or "processes" all types of data resulting from the convergence of video, audio, software and content files. Another way of describing the PCD is as a "jukebox on steroids". Besides the traditional market of data intensive Fortune 1000 corporations, the PCD might just be what the doctor ordered for those dozens of new Internet companies providing large amount of contents over the Web. By offering a low cost alternative to servers. The PCD is a totally redesigned and rethought optical disc changer (a.k.a. jukebox or optical disc library) that claims much faster disc swapping than any changer currently on the market. And with the new tendency towards the separation of servers from storage demonstrated by new network architectures such as Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) true efficiency will be achieved with with an economical PCD. Already, companies such as Warner brothers, Sony, Disney and other Hollywood studios are expanding their current online offerings to provide more Megabyte gobbling video and interactive contents. These sites currently use stacks of servers and some are even using RAM disks (huge amounts of extremely expensive RAM memory) to provide fast response time to accommodate the large demands for their most popular contents. The "need for speed" makes sense for accommodating the requests for the "hot" content but after a day or a week or a month, the requests for the once "hot" content decreases as newer "hotter" content takes over, so the old content can be migrated to slower servers. Most Web sites don't migrate and keep their entire contents on very expensive servers when in fact they could migrate that contents as archives on slower optical libraries. Having an economical means of storage would surely help in the development of such sites. The patented system requires far fewer steps in the process of swapping discs and accomplishes those few steps much faster. The result is an optical disc changer that can provide access time to any disc (up to 100) almost as fast as a dedicated optical disc server when the disc spin up time is taken into account. The optical medium (CD, DVD) is a cheaper medium and, coupled with a jukebox, can provide access time to all the archives at a fraction of the cost. The problem is that with current jukebox technologies, swap time is very slow, from 5 to 10 seconds, and that discourages a lot of companies from investing in that technology. That's where the PCD comes to the rescue by offering a substantially faster access time with a machine that costs less than an equivalent optical disc server. Besides requiring fewer moving and other mechanical the PCD is also less expensive simply because a server has one player/recorder for each disc, so a 100 disc server has 100 individual players/recorders (EACH COSTING FROM $70.00 TO $500.00 or more) whereas a PCD only has from 1 to 8 players/recorders but still carry a stack of 100 discs. The access time between each disc is so fast (estimated to be at around 1/10th of a second) that even during peak demands, by swapping quickly, the PCD could provide requests to more than 8 end users simultaneously without much of a difference to each one because when the demand is huge, other constraints come into play, mainly bandwidth, which slow download time to a crawl and obviate any speed advantage that a server can have. The storage business is not the "sexiest" area of hi-tech because everybody takes it for granted. Right now, all the eyes are toward "Internet start-ups" proposing new "business models" but let's not forget that what makes those businesses possible is software and data and they both need storage. Additional details about the product can be obtained through the following contacts: www.pcdproject.com ATTN: Louis Conrad 121 St-Pierre Street, office 606 Montreal,Quebec Canada H2Y 2L6 Phone: (514)992-0298 Fax: (514)843-8506 E-mail: pcdproject@videotron.ca To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-www" in the body of the message
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