Features - Storage Innovations:

ASACA ANNOUNCES WORLD'S LARGEST BLUE LASER LIBRARY

During RSNA, ASACA Corp debuted a new breed of high capacity storage archive adding support for Sony's new Professional Disc for DATA drives to ASACA's award-winning family of TeraCart Multimedia Storage System optical libraries. With initial shipments expected in Q1 2004, the new Professional Disc for DATA based libraries can record up to 978,600 x-ray images (at 10MB per image) writing onto durable, random access media at up to 9MB per second. Offering more than twice the capacity of red laser optical libraries and offering data throughput speeds comparable to tape-based solutions, the new family of libraries requires no more than a three foot square of floor space.

Based on blue laser technology, Sony's Professional Disc for DATA drives are designed to meet the performance and 24-7 operation requirements of today's healthcare environments.

"Sony's Professional Disc for DATA technology is designed to meet the existing and emerging capacity and performance requirements that the market demands," said Rick Thong, marketing manager for storage solutions at Sony Electronics' Component Solutions Business Division. "The drives can be easily integrated into libraries such as the TeraCart Multimedia Storage System for reliable, secure and long-term storage."

Ideal for commercial and professional data storage use in all major markets including medical, broadcast and government, the new TeraCarts can be equipped with one to six Sony Professional Disc for DATA drives to provide organizations up to 9MB per second write speeds and 11MB per second read. Available with both SAN and NAS support, the modular library offers the flexibility to start with a single cabinet and expand to as many as eight libraries for capacities reaching hundreds of Terabytes. Using pass-through and infrared communications, the libraries can be easily managed as a single physical unit.

"Harnessing Sony's Professional Disc for DATA technology into our TeraCart libraries provides the professional broadcast with a unique breakthrough solution that is ideally tuned to the capacity and throughput demands required to store and retrieve medical images and patient records," said Chuck Larabie, vice president of sales and marketing for ASACA/ShibaSoku Corp. "This new category of libraries bridges the gap for today's medical archive requirements which need the random access and removability of CD and DVD technology, but can't let go of the per cartridge capacity of tape.

A superior option to tape libraries, a single Professional Disc for DATA media cartridge can hold up to 23.3GB of data or the equivalent of up to 2,300 x-ray images, at 10MB per image. Sony's Professional Disc for DATA product offering starts with the first generation 23.3GB drive and boasts a roadmap that extends to a second generation 50GB, followed by a third-generation targeted at 100GB in 2007 with a throughput of 43MB per second.