EMC, a leader in complicated storage devices for big businesses, is trying to make home storage simple for the consumer. It’s a lofty goal considering only 10% of people in the U.S. actually back up their important family photos and videos.
But EMC’s Iomega unit, which the company acquired for $213 million in June, wants to change all that. On Wednesday, it launched the Iomega StorCenter ix2, a storage device that connects over a network to personal computers and other connected devices in the home.
The ix2 can push content such as photos and music it stores to an Xbox 360, for example, so users can display photos on their big screen TV. Later this year, the company will also introduce a feature that allows owners to access their own content and even share limited portions of it with other people outside of their own home network from the Internet.
The storage device, which will cost consumers $300 for one terabyte and $480 for two terabytes of storage, will be available in retail stores for data junkies to purchase.
Jonathan Huberman, head of EMC’s consumer and small business products division, tells the Business Technology Blog that the goal is to help consumers store and move their media files around and outside the home. But the real reason we see EMC pushing so hard into the home is because they don’t want to feel left out of the consumer-storage party. Corporations may produce a lot of stuff to store, but it’s no match for a proud new father making hour-long high-definition home videos of his baby sleeping to show the grandparents.
“Seventy percent of all data being created is by individuals,” says Huberman, citing a statistic from IDC, a market research firm. “It’s got to go somewhere.”
The ix2 isn’t exactly an original idea. There are several networked storage vendors, including H-P, which last year launched its HP MediaSmart Server just in time for the holidays. For consumers, some of these devices can be confusing. Many consumers have trouble just getting their home network up and running, let alone connecting a giant storage device to it.
But Huberman says the company focused specifically on how to make this device easy to use. For example, setting the device up into a home network can happen in only four clicks, he says.
