News

posted on 03 April 2008 07:23

EMC has designed and built a StudioCredenza home storage product for the Chinese market, offering up to 4TB of space in which to store files and serve iTunes music.

The box is a large paperback book-sized unit containing four SATA drives and connectability options of an Ethernet port, two eSATA ports and four USB 2.0 ports. There is no direct wireless capability but, presumably, if it were connected to a wireless router, then WiFi-connected PCs could link to it.

It is very similar to HP's recently-announced home MediaVault although this has a maximum of two 500GB SATA drives. Small business models have either 1TB or 1.5TB configurations.

It also overlaps Microsoft's bug-affected HomeServer. A third area of competition comes from Western Digital and Seagate with their own home storage products. WD has just announced its MyBook Studio Edition II.

All these manufacturers are trying to gauge what software and features needs adding to a mini storage array for home and very small businesses. The HP box can function as a picture-serving web site and, like EMC's product, has an iTunes capability. It also has a continuous data protection capability which seems more advanced than EMC's Retrospect product.

The StudioCredenza suppports direct image transfer from digital cameras with the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTF). It is managed via a web browser, meaning a PC or games consiole such as a Wii or PlayStation III. The product comes with EMC's Retrospect backup software plus a search function.

A StudioCredenza 500 with 500GB capacity will come before calendar Q4. The product line will become in available in markets outside China at an unspecified future date.

Why only China now? EMC's Asia business unit boss, Steven Leonard, is reported in the WSJ as saying: "China is quickly becoming the second-largest consumer market in the world." That begs the question of why it wasn't launched in the largest consumer market in the world. Perhaps EMC wants to fine tune the product before engaging in head-to-head product competition with HP and Microsoft.

China has figured in EMC's attempt to acquire Iomega and a supposition is that EMC wants to build up a comanding position as a locally-based Chinese consumer and business market storage supplier. EMC is also interested in expanding outside its business storage niche, admittedly huge, and become a supplier of stirage based products and services for consumers and very small businesses, witness the Mozy online backup service acquisition.

Mandarin speakers can find out more at this website: website: http://www.51baoxiang.cn/. A 1TB version costs 8,980 renminbi or $1,279 (c£650) which is a large amount for the raw storage capacity.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}