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Growth in Digital Home Content Shapes Future of Storage and Gives Rise to Personal Network Drives (17/5/2005)

Zetera Addresses Network Storage Practices for the Digital Home and Offers Advice on Selecting a Personal Network Drive

As a result of the digital media revolution, many home users are transforming their PCs from business tools and e-mail devices into jukeboxes and entertainment centers. Consumers now can enjoy a radically different digital lifestyle than was possible only a few years ago, making the storing, sharing and protection of their growing volume of digital content a major priority. According to Zetera Corporation, the developer of a breakthrough network storage technology, a new kind of storage solution is required that provides home users with a centralized repository for their digital content, enabling them to manage it effectively and protect it in the event of a data disaster. Zetera believes the answer is the Personal Network Drive.

The simultaneous decline in PC prices, proliferation of home networks and penetration of residential broadband has delivered unprecedented access to digital content and the requirement to share it among multiple computers. It is estimated that 13.5 million households already have a home network in the United States. IDC predicts that number to increase 25 percent to 111 million by 2008.

As the digital revolution continues, Zetera believes storage will take center stage. With a single MP3-encoded song occupying about 4 Megabytes (MB) and a typical DVD-video occupying almost 5 Gigabytes (GB), consumers require more storage than ever. High definition (HD) video will stretch the envelope much further. But studies show that consumers have yet to evolve from the traditional means of sharing storage on a small network. For sharing digital content across a home network, consumers still rely on PC-attached shared storage, the sharing of USB/Firewire and internal disk drives.

"While PC-attached shared storage has historically been sufficient for backup, it has many drawbacks such as performance bottlenecks, limited scalability and awkward sharing, making it unacceptable for applications that involve music, video, digital photography or gaming," said Chuck Cortright, president and CEO of Zetera. "Storing, sharing and protecting digital content on home networks requires solutions that offer all the benefits of today's residential network storage as well the performance and ease-of-use required for more intensive applications."

According to Zetera, the option that offers the best performance at the lowest cost is the Personal Network Drive--a storage device that, while physically connected to router, access point or switch--appears, behaves and is managed exactly as an internal disk drive, or "C" drive, would operate. Personal Network Drives consolidate and centralize storage on a home network, enabling users to utilize content storage capacity more effectively, ensure access to data simultaneously from multiple devices and protect irreplaceable files in the event of disk failure.

"Personal Network Drives are driving the momentum of the adoption of residential network storage as the optimal way to save and share up all of the digital content in a household," added Cortright. "Built with true Storage Area Network (SAN) technology, Personal Network Drives deliver better performance, higher reliability and greater scalability at a price point below that of today's solutions."

When selecting a Personal Network Drive, Zetera suggests that the product meets the following requirements: -0-

1. Personal Network Drives must connect directly to the network router, switch, hub or wireless access point/router, making digital content available to any user regardless of the status or activities of other PCs on the network. Directly connecting Personal Network Drives to the network ensures there are no bottlenecks between the user and their digital content.

2. Personal Network Drives should appear to the user as additional local disk drives with drive letters. Consumers have been conditioned to access digital content stored on a drive letter ("C" drive) or a My Documents folder, and should be able to do the same with shared storage. To the user, Personal Network Drives appear, behave and are managed in the same fashion as a local disk drive with its own drive letter, simplifying access to data and management of software settings.

3. Personal Network Drives should provide enough performance to stream multiple DVD-quality movies simultaneously, and users should be able access digital content from multiple devices simultaneously. Personal Network Drives must be able to accommodate delivery of DVD-quality video, MP3 music and miscellaneous business applications simultaneously.

4. Personal Network Drives should enable capacity expansion by adding capacity to existing disk drives and without changing software settings. Users should be able to add storage capacity without changing software settings. Personal Network Drives enable users to add storage devices to any empty network port and allocate additional storage to existing volumes.

5. Personal Network Drives should provide access control to protect sensitive files. Users need to be able to share public content and keep privates files out of reach of other network users. Personal Network Drives enables users to allocate storage for public ("shared") or private use.

6. Personal Network Drives must protect digital content and critical files without additional software or user intervention. Digital content should be protected in the event of hard disk failure. Personal Network Drives provide users with the option of local or remote, continuous backup ("mirroring") to protect digital content and precious files.

Zetera's innovative network storage technology is enabling a new generation of high performance, low cost home storage devices. These Personal Network Drives offer new storage solutions for protected media vaults, enabling automated backups through a pair of mirrored hard drives. The Zetera solution makes digital content available throughout the networked digital home.

www.zetera.com