Semi-OT: EMC Predicts Web's Future Is Storage-centric
By Barbara Darrow, TechWeb News
Aug 2, 2000 (2:42 PM)
URL: techweb.com
EMC on Wednesday pulled out all the stops to convince Wall Street that it can continue its winning streak into next year and beyond. In the EMC
(stock: EMC) worldview trotted out for the press and analysts at Harvard University's Sanders Theater, the price of bandwidth and storage will sink
like a stone in the next five years, leading to an explosion of personal Internet storage. Users will use the Web to store not only traditional data, but
also greater numbers of digital photographs; works of art; and complex images, such as CAT scans, in their personal Net-based storage space, EMC
executives said.
A "huge buildout" of the optical network will make it seem as though bandwidth is free, and a simultaneous explosion of data-storage capacity will
give users the perception of "free and infinite storage -- which luckily for us will not actually be free," said Jim Rothnie, senior vice president of
product management at EMC, Hopkinton, Mass.
Simply put, the Web infrastructure will bulk up tremendously. The miles of fiber-optic cable will jump from 20 million to 20 billion worldwide in five
years. And the capacity of each fiber will be boosted a thousandfold by dense WDM (DWDM), Rothnie said.
During the same period, the cost of disk storage will fall, from 30 to 40 cents per megabyte now to 1 cent per megabyte.
Of course, this view puts EMC -- and perhaps bandwidth purveyors -- in the catbird seat. snip<>
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