14 Jul 2010, Posted by mikefoong in the category, 0 Comments

At home with iOmega

The old new player is back in town. Once at the height of portable storage with Zip and Jazz drive, iomega is back and this time with an arsenal of products to take over the industry. Merging with EMC and having an enterprise class storage giant as the acquiring company makes the partnership even more sweeter to the consumer.

Update: theITChannel Vidcast – Host Christel Quek takes you on a quick tour  of the event, V.Clone and Drop Guard after the jump

EMC now has an end-to-end storage market from the low cost consumer portable storage to high end enterprise grade SAN storages. The good thing is, we would see some of the higher grade storage software from the enterprise flowing down to the consumer products. We can only hope that one day enterprise class storage systems and software becomes widely available to use data consuming folks at home.

The event was held at the loft at duxton hill, they simulated a home environment where iomega products plays a part in managing the home’s data storage. The showcase includes Network Attached Storage (NAS) to prosumer 4 disk high available storage. Where the storage had some form of data management and data protection system called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disk) and it allows you to combine multiple disk into one large volume called striping. To media centers and practical storage usage like CCTV (close circuit television) surveillance footage.

With RSA ( a large data security company and a pioneer in the data security encryption algorithms) under EMC’s group of companies, they also provide secure storage solution for those of us who has valuable data stored on portable media. These drives comes with high end enterprise grade security encryption on their disk. So you won’t even need to worry about encrypting your data when you store them on a portable device. This helps when you lose your portable hard disk or if your portable hard disk is stolen.

Two things that attracted me to the whole development of the consumer level storage is that iomega is really leveraging on the current trends of portable data storage and ability to merge with it’s own software or 3rd party partners. They are making it easy for consumers to expand their data storage requirements while providing easy to use software to manage their data needs.

With partnerships with VMware, they are able to preinstall V.Clone, a software that enables you to clone your working environment and bring your current working environment anywhere you go on a portable hard disk. In fact you can bring different working environments for different type of work or play as long as your portable can hold the space for your working environments. The beauty of this software is that you are able to keep your environments in sync. Meaning even if you are working overseas with a clone of your environment and when you come back to home base, you are able to sync not on the files that you are working on, it also syncs the updates you have made to the software you’ve installed and the operating system.

This is probably an extension or a lighter version of the popular VMware V.Motion software where you can clone a live system and migrate it to a virtual environment while it is still running. If you remember the Norton Ghost, this is like Norton Ghost with VMware Virtualisation all rolled into one.

We will update with videos soon. Updated: Video of the Event

Producer: Michael Foong
Camera/Photographer: Wilfred Phua and Christel Quek
Host: Christel Quek