Meanwhile, beware of cobbled-together storage systems from unknown vendors that cram multiple, rewriteable DVD drives into a box. You need long-term service and support, so pin down your vendor on its upgrade and shelf-life claims. Your archival system should be something that's still readable down the line, so keep your storage equipment under a maintenance contract because once it can't be serviced anymore, your data is more or less dead. And don't sell yourself short by choosing a cheap solution for your long-term data archival system. Your long-term data is just too valuable.
Steven J. Schuchart Jr. covers storage and servers for Network Computing. Write to him at [email protected].
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There is no single DVD storage standard today. Instead, there are the rival DVD+R and DVD-R write-once formats. DVD+R was developed by the DVD+RW Alliance, while the DVD Forum introduced DVD-R.
The DVD Forum (www.dvdforum.org), the official DVD standards body, has struggled to set a format standard for the industry. This has bred chaos, with rival formats and confusing "+" and "-" nomenclature. But the forum's role may not matter all that much in the end, because rogue formats continue to emerge and the market will determine the DVD standard format, anyway.
The new, optical blue-laser DVD format, meanwhile, appears to be heading down the same twisted path. There are two blue-laser formats: Advanced Optical Disk (AOD) and Blu-ray. AOD, developed by NEC and Toshiba, has a capacity of 20 GB on a single-layer disk and 40 GB on a dual-layer disk. Blu-ray (www.blu-ray.com) comes from Sony, with the backing of eight other vendors, including JVC, Panasonic, Phillips and Pioneer. It has a capacity of 27 GB on a single-sided, single-layer disk and 50 GB on a single-sided, double-layer disk. The DVD Forum is studying both Blu-ray and the competing AOD optical format.
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