How to keep CDs in their place

By ADAM GIFFORD

It looks like an oversized salad spinner, a translucent green plastic doughnut standing about 40cm high.

It's the Century CD, an Australian-developed compact disc storage system due to be released on both sides of the Tasman next month.

Give it a year and the green Century CD and its big sister, the red and beige Century-CD Rewritable, could be a feature of every home, school, small office, print shop or other place where CDs are commonplace.

Andy Jager from master distributor Global Data Storage Solutions said he was talking to specialist and general distributors as well as large retail chains.

"We're not offering exclusive distribution," said Mr Jager, who left his job with Hewlett Packard to get behind the product.

"We think this is a market waiting to happen."

Initial production is for 125,000 units in New Zealand and Australia and a further 1 million for Asia.

Computer Associates, one of the world's largest software companies, is committed to pushing the product through its global distribution channels, seeing it as a way to sell its storage backup and anti-virus software into the home and small business market.

Century CD is the brainchild of Daniel Elbaum of Project Lab, whose previous inventions include a tennis simulator now owned by tennis products manufacturer Prince and a mobile Eftpos terminal widely used in New Zealand.

He said that with billions of CDs being produced every year, storage was a major problem.

"Parents of teenagers are walking on CDs when they try to go into their kids' rooms," Mr Elbaum said.

"The home market was obvious, but as I started developing for that I realised there was also nothing for the office.

"Major companies can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars on robotic libraries, but for companies with five to 500 people, there is a problem."

The basic Century CD takes 100 CDs in its doughnut-shaped ring, fed in and out with a miniature robotics system.

It is connected to a PC or Mac by USB (Universal SeriaI Bus). The software produces an automatic catalogue of contents, allowing CDs to be retrieved by pointing and clicking.

Pricing worldwide is $US200 (about $490) for the Century CD and $US500 ($1230) for the Century CD-RW, which will come on the market in mid-November.

A DVD version will come out next year.

Where the Century CD gets really interesting is that up to 10 units can be stacked.

String each stack in a chain to the 27-device limit of USB and you have a storage system with 2700 CDs or potentially more than a terabyte of data running off one server.

That kind of system will need industrial strength software, which Project Lab is getting from its deal with Computer Associates.

"The agreement we have allows us to bundle ACCServe backup and recovery software and Inoculate virus protection," Mr Elbaum said.

Computer Associates' southern region storage manager, Dr Matthew Starr, said Century CD was an opportunity for his firm to get its storage management software into the small and medium enterprises.



He first heard about Project Lab when he was shopping for a system to use in an online back-up service for laptop users.

"I couldn't make a storage ASP [application service provider] service work with any form of existing service.

"This reduces storage costs to under 1c-a-megabyte levels."

The Computer Associates service, to be called Lifeguard, will be tried in Australia this year and rolled out to the rest of the world if successful.

Links


Century-CD

Global Data Storage