The military is living the Digital Life, driving investment and innovation
It should be no surprise that the Digital Revolution is affecting the US Military much like it is our life and work.
Our common need: lots of content, delivered everywhere.
James Rogers at Byte and Switch found that storage infrastructure is one of the spending priorities from the recently passed Defense Authorization Bill.
For the military, the investment are probably not driven by YouTube and iTunes and Skype. But the need for better access to data in dicey locations does drive technology innovation:
Just goes to show that we’re all living a digital revolution that’s affecting every aspect of society. Let’s hope that as has happened many times in the past, investments in defense reap innovations that help us all in our daily lives.
How can you apply this innovation in your patch of the world?
Businesses are keeping their surveillance data for up to a year
Jack Hatfield filled me in on Cor Digital Technology, Inc.’s surveillance business. They’ve been focused on this market for a while now and are seeing lots of growth. He also talks about his growing mobile surveillance business and what’s driving it.
Gotta love those terabytes!
By the way, Seagate has a three-product solution set for surveillance: SV35 drives for surveillance DVRs, Barracuda ES drives for enterprise surveillance and EE25 for mobile/rugged surveillance.
Removable storage is easy to integrate for a profitable recurring revenue stream
I spoke with Randal Barber and Dan Bovee from CRU Dataport today. Their removable storage solutions are an innovative way to protect and manage business or institutional data.
Randal is President, Dan is Director of Business Development. CRU Dataport acquired StorCase, by the way, in case you’re familiar with the Data Express product. I met with them at the NASBA conference in Baltimore.
Examples of killer solutions with these products: mobile surveillance (think police cars), schools and colleges where each student has a removable disk instead of a dedicated PC, accountants that want to put the data on their PC in a safe every night.
Cool stuff, with a lucrative annuity revenue stream. One school district buys tens of thousands of drive cartridges every quarter!
Seagate and CRU are working together on several applications, including some with our EE25 “extreme environment” drive.
What’s the right storage for a rugged notebook? It depends.
CRN recently conducted a Toughest Notebook Challenge. The tests were real-world, “I can’t believe I did that” abuses to notebooks from Acer, Panasonic, Toshiba and Dell. Acer and Panasonic came out on top.
These systems all used standard-class notebook disk drives, as best I can tell. Seagate’s entries in this space are the Momentus family of drives. Toughness for storage is either built in to the drive (like our EE25 drive for extreme environments) or built around it with cases, absorbers, etc.
Which method is best for you depends upon what the notebook is meant to do. Using a standard drive frees you to offer value-add features like flash-infused hybrid technology, secure Full Disk Encryption and drop-safe Zero-G Sensor technology. Capacity will always be the highest here as well.
Rugged drives are the right solution when the application is really funky, or when the chassis-related costs of protecting a regular drive exceed the incremental cost of the rugged drive.
And do some real-world testing before you claim you’re tough enough!
