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Interesting new product news...

wow, that is huge.

Doesn't look like Kaleidescape has officially announced this stuff yet. Sorry I didn't get any info from them on this...

Looks like the call was for dealers and the public announcement hasn't happened yet... I'll check with some sources.

--josh
 
Hi guys,
While it is true that K is introducing a new "starter" system, it has not officially announced the specifics. There is no reason for concern here. The new system is designed to allow for a lower end entry into the world of K. It still requires significant expense to get the new system up to the storage capacity and multi-room functionality that most of us have. K has not abandoned the system we all have. It is still available and viewed by K as their "flagship" product. Support will continue as usual. More folks finding their way to K is a good thing and can only benefit ALL owners going forward.

Jim
 
cinelife said:
Hi guys,
While it is true that K is introducing a new "starter" system, it has not officially announced the specifics. There is no reason for concern here. The new system is designed to allow for a lower end entry into the world of K. It still requires significant expense to get the new system up to the storage capacity and multi-room functionality that most of us have. K has not abandoned the system we all have. It is still available and viewed by K as their "flagship" product. Support will continue as usual. More folks finding their way to K is a good thing and can only benefit ALL owners going forward.

Jim
Click to expand...

Jim,

I can't speak for others, but I for one am not worried and don't think that other K owners have any reason to worry either. There's room in the marketplace for multiple system types and given the details already mentioned (which I have no reason to question as inaccurate given the source), the new system is at least more limited in capacity and I might guess that zone limitations might also surface as another differentiator. And then there's HD support which we have in the high end system and will have in BR and/or HD-DVD support once the details are worked out. I could see that, after those are finalized, a reader that supports HD disc import will be standard on a base high end K system while it would be optional on the entry level one. Those last 2 are just guesses on my part, but they don't seem out of the realm of possibility. After all, if you do have 2 similar products ate very different price points, you have to ensure that value is reatined in the higher end one in part by differentiating the feature set. Really, in my mind, this new system is definately a different offering and there's no reason to think that K won't offer both systems going forward.

This new system does pose a few questions though. For one, as it appears to utilize 750GB drives, are those now or will they be shortly available for the high end system? Secondly, can this new combination reader and movie player be used in the high end system? I could see some use for it to consolidate space in certain zones. That direct play ability could also be useful to all owners for rental discs, promo DVDs you get about this product or that, checking out a friend's home video, etc

The last question I have has less to do with this new system and more to do with increasing drive capacities. With 750GB drives, the capacity per drive has reached a point to where I might very well want to replace my 300GB drives with these larger ones. I recognize that there won't be any trade-in value for the used drives and that's fine. However, I think it would be very helpful for K to have some official way to swap out smaller drives for larger ones. The RAID system they use technically allows for you to replace drives, even if the new drives don't have the same capacity of the old. The issue is that for one, it's a time consuming process as you have to do them one by one and each disc takes hours to rebuild. Secondly, K tech folks have said more than once that they don't recommend completely rebuilding a server with all new drives in the manner I described. With that much successive rebuilding, they have concerns about 100% data accuracy. So, it would be cool if they came up with some way for owners to accomplish this.

Jeff
 
rgbyhkr said:
This new system does pose a few questions though. For one, as it appears to utilize 750GB drives, are those now or will they be shortly available for the high end system? Secondly, can this new combination reader and movie player be used in the high end system? I could see some use for it to consolidate space in certain zones. That direct play ability could also be useful to all owners for rental discs, promo DVDs you get about this product or that, checking out a friend's home video, etc
Jeff
Click to expand...

Hi Jeff,
As you know, K is getting positioned to move into HD-DVD/BR (one or both) as soon as that becomes possible. The 750GB drives are available (or will be very shortly) for the larger system. Although they are available for the new system, they are an upgrade. The new system starts with 250GB drives (2), and then is upgradeable to a max. (4)-750GB drives. Yes, the new movie player does work with the larger system. In fact, all components are compatible within the K systems (with the only exception perhaps being the exact HD's in the new server (I believe they lay flat and may be a smaller form.)
Can't answer the HD mixing question, but perhaps it would be as simple as using the largest sized disk (750) as the raid and then, I would think, any other combinations of drives wouldn't matter. But frankly I'm not sure if that's possible. I'll ask K on Monday.

Jim
 
Thanks for the info Jim and I figured that the new player/reader should work with the existing systems. As for the HD question, let me be a little more specific so as to make my possible eventual intent clear. I have 2 servers full of 300GB drives (all 24 bought as part of my initial install). So, if I wanted to swap out them all or perhaps just one server, that's a lot of rebuilding. Sure, I probably could change out just a few but let's say I wanted to do them all. In that case it would be nice to have a way to make that process easier.

As an aside, I'm not definitely going to take this route. I've gone back and forth for a while as to whether I would do the above or get a 3rd server. I have about 300GB of free space left on my system, so I'm approaching decision time soon. The downside of course is the cost of the 3rd chassis before ever buying a new drive but there are several upsides:

- First, I'd have 12 free drive slots. That would allow me to retain the entirety of the storage I have now. Since I'd have to buy new drives in either case, this method allows me to get the entire 750GB of new space vs. only 450GB more with a replacement scenario. Free slots also finally allows me to use a transport drive, which I never have been able to.

- Secondly, I could be much smarter this time around and just buy new drives as I needed them. I could get a couple 750GB drives to start in a new server but by the next time I needed new ones, they could have 1GB versions available. I might be able to do the same in the old servers, but then you're talking about possibly mixing 3 drive sizes at some point and I don't know if that would be advisable. Even if it were ok, you'd probably need to purchase at least 2 drives for each new size to allow one to be the redundant drive (assuming as you say that the the redundant drive must be the same size as the largest capacity drive in the server).

- I'd get a gigabit NIC. My 2 servers now are of the old 100MB variety. It doesn't impact my current usage but might very well later for HD content. Since my existing servers are almost full, and even if they weren't I know how to use the grouping function to force a reader to import to a specific server, all imported HD content would go to the new server. That would prevent a bandwidth bottleneck later on. I could just upgrade the existing servers, but since the only change is a new NIC, it doesn't seem worth the very high upgrade cost.

Anyways, thanks again for chiming in.

Jeff
 
As you stated, you have several options. I'll speak with K on Monday and attempt to clarify some of your points. I'll report back what Tech tells me. Another option might be to pick-up the new server with (4) 750 drives. Would be less $ than adding another 5U server, but of course you also limit your storage capabilities going forward.

To be clear, I have no idea if I'm correct about the redundant drive requirements, it just seems logical that would be the case (okay as long the raid drive was at least the same storage cap. as the drive it backs up), but as this area is not within my limited expertise I plan to talk with K about this.

My main reason for the inquiry is to determine if its possible to just swap out a 750 for the 500 dedicated for raid and then add 750's into whatever number of slots (or replace smaller drives) are available. As I said, seems logical, but then again......

Jim
 
Just following up. As logic dictates, adding 750's to any server is not a problem. The first 750 that is added will deal with parity/redundancy. For example, adding a 750 to a server with 500GB drives will result in a net 500GB from the new 750 (the other 250GB is dedicated to par/red, added to the 500GB already dedicated to redund. for a total 750GB back up which is obviously required to support the 750GB drives).

Jim
 
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