Home ›  Industry Insights ›

Why We Need Whole Home Storage Architecture

Intel conducts in-depth research with people around the world to explore their homes, cultures, relationships, desires, and how they interact with technology. The goal of this effort is to improve our understanding of where Intel platforms can make meaningful differences in their lives. One of the focal points of our research is to learn how people interact with their large and growing collections of digital media.

People are generating immense collections of photos and home video, and they are building large music and video libraries consisting of media they buy on the Internet, obtain from friends and family, or purchase in stores.

During our research, we spent many hours with people in an attempt to understand:

• Where, why and how do they create or acquire digital media today, and how have they done so in the past?
• What devices do they use to acquire and create their media, and where are these devices located and used, within and outside the home?
• Where are they currently storing these files?
• Are they creating backup copies, and if so, how? If not, why? Would they like to do this?
• What do they do with their media once they have it? Do they view it alone, with others, share the media, or file it away?
• What would they like to be able to do with their media that they are not doing today?
• How do they find what they are looking for?

Our findings indicate clear gaps in the ability of current products to simply and intuitively help people to protect, share and access media that is of value to them.

In response to this, Intel has created a new vision of whole-home storage that addresses this increasingly important problem for people around the world. This article presents an overview of what Intel’s consumer research tells us about home storage trends – and how whole home storage architecture can help fill the gaps.

Still cameras, video cameras, phones, mobile multi-media devices, laptops, PCs, digital video recorders (DVRs) and a growing set of other devices are all part of the wide range of tools used by people to acquire the digital media they want. People use these devices in different ways, at different places and times depending on their motivations and lifestyles. In addition to personal media, such as digital photos, video and music, people also look to their friends and family for media and select from an increasingly available selection of media and premium content available on the Internet and directly from service providers.

This trend has two very important aspects:

1. People around the world share high-level objectives, including the desire to find and create digital media, protect and store it, easily find and access it, and ultimately enjoy and share it.
2. While the high level objectives are the same, there are also many differences. These include regional social contexts, multiple types of media files, different purposes for acquiring, viewing and sharing it, as well as the unique size and infrastructure of homes, varying types of devices and specific media sources.

Qualitative and quantitative research tells us that people are accumulating increasingly vast amounts of digital media. Some people are already feeling the pain of coping with these burgeoning collections through conventional solutions including external hard drive storage, DVD storage and the expedient of deleting files on their devices to make room for more.

Other users are only beginning to realize the problems involved with storing, protecting, finding and enjoying large volumes of digital media stored in different locations. It is clear that the continuing growth in the volume of media in coming years will be a huge problem for people worldwide, if comprehensive solutions are not made available.

Figure 1 shows how the number of connected devices, average file size and cumulative data volume in the home continues to grow. According to estimates compiled by the Diffusion Group and Intel, by 2010 consumers in the typical networked home will be required to deal with terabytes of data, in hundreds of thousands of files, stored and used across ten or more devices.

Figure 1. Consumers are using more connected devices in the home to access
an exploding volume of media. (Sources)

Intel researchers have spoken with very few people who store all their media files on the hard drive of a single PC. Many homes include multiple PCs and other devices, such as multimedia mobile devices, laptops and DVRs, and each of them is used to store unique types of files.

Today, each PC or CE device used for storage of digital media tends to become an isolated media “island.” While the local media files on an individual device can be easily accessed and searched, the media stored on other islands is often difficult to access. Accessing a particular file requires people to engage in the time-consuming and frustrating task of moving the files between devices. Each time a consumer acquires a new device that includes storage, another island is created in the home.

Accessing media from other islands often requires the creation of a physical copy, usually an optical disk, which is then physically transferred to another device. With data and media files dispersed across multiple devices and storage media, finding a particular picture, song, video or file can be frustrating.

Another issue is that each device tends to have its own unique software with a unique view into the media stored on the device. The user must understand each particular view in order to access, manage and enjoy the media held on that device. As users add more devices, the challenge of keeping track of the different views becomes increasingly burdensome and error-prone, leading to emotional frustration and potential loss of data.

Shared drives or networked-mapped drives can provide relief for the most tech-savvy consumers. But this requires users to remember which media resides on what drive. Share drives do nothing to shield the user from the responsibility of remembering each device’s unique view into the media.

As time passes and the media library and number of devices continue to expand, managing the entire media collection across these islands of storage can become an overwhelming problem. Finding media files in such an environment can be like looking for a needle across many large haystacks.

Despite indications that the majority of people place a high value on their digital memories, many people do not back up their digital files. There are many reasons for this, including limited understanding of complex backup solutions, lack of awareness of the need to back up files, and a general feeling of helplessness about finding the right media storage solution.

Even people who are diligent about backing up their digital media will often use failure-prone disks and platforms with limited lifetimes, without realizing the risks. External hard drives may crash, CDs and DVDs can be easily damaged and have limited lifetimes. And archiving files can be a tedious chore – archiving 2 terabytes of data requires approximately 400 DVD-Rs or 67 HD DVDs.

When it comes to file backups, many users are uncomfortable with the available software, and they express concern about locking up their valuable files in formats that may not be playable or viewable with future technologies or operating systems. Other users are reluctant to backup their private files to Internet storage services.

Figure 2. Data in the home is usually stored on a single hard drive, and few users back up even their most valuable and hard to replace media leaving it only one disk failure away from loss.

People respond to home storage challenges with a variety of strategies. The two most common approaches are burning CDs and dragging files to an external hard drive. Some people go to great lengths to organize their collections and make it easier for themselves to find certain movies or saved TV shows, even creating catalogs using word processing or spreadsheet programs.

To locate particular media files stored on CDs or external storage devices, users often need to plug and unplug USB hard drives or insert and remove a series of CDs until they find the files they want. To remedy this, some consumers use online storage services.

While these make it easier for users to locate their files, Internet bandwidth restrictions can make writing and reading files a very slow process. Space restrictions often mean that the only saved version of a media file is compressed, which can impact image quality. Privacy concerns also limit online storage options.

For all these reasons, it is easy to understand why many consumers report being overwhelmed by the task of managing their digital media collections and finding a storage solution that is reliable, trusted and easy to use. And while home media servers may be an alternative for some, there are purchase, installation and maintenance barriers to the adoption of a centralized storage resource.

At Intel, we believe home storage solutions should be capable of working with distributed, unplanned storage devices, and these solutions should remove the need for people to manage storage and access across devices. We favor a model of distributed media creation and acquisition that is immediately available across devices without user intervention.

Today’s fragmented home storage architecture does not provide the accessibility, permanence and performance required by emerging digital home usage models. While consumers enjoy creating and consuming digital media, they are often discouraged when it comes to finding, moving, organizing, backing up, reformatting and annotating their files. We envision a whole home storage architecture that will bring the familiar, local storage experience to all the data and media in the home.

The first requirement is to make all stored media easily accessible. Ideally, data should be as accessible as it would be from the local hard drive. We envision a whole home storage directory structure that provides organized access to all media across all devices within the home. This means that the view across all data should be accessible – and identical – from any connected device.

Applications that point to this unified view will provide users with familiar access to whole home media. People will no longer need to remember which connected device has the data or manually search through the file directory of each device. Once people acquire or create a media file, it will be immediately accessible from the unified view on any device within the home.

Such a view can benefit other usage models too. Viewing files from connected devices outside the home network becomes much easier. Synchronization is simpler when files are easy to find and copy from multiple devices anywhere on the home network. Backup becomes easier since a single machine can backup the entire home media collection. And the unified view of home media could also be made available over an Internet connection to provide flexible access from remote devices.

The next important requirement is data permanence. Replication of data on multiple devices provides a level of redundancy to protect data against a disk failure or other unplanned event. Replication works best when it is automatic and occurs in real time. We envision an architecture where the storage resource within the home can be used seamlessly to hold multiple copies of any file. If multiple copies are available, the user sees only one copy. Writes are automatically made to all available copies, providing real-time backup.

Performance and ease of use are also important criteria. Ideally a file accessed across the network from a separate storage device will arrive as quickly as if the file had been accessed locally. Reaching this level of performance will be a challenge for slower devices and networks.

Current home network attached storage (NAS) products often fall far short of this goal, and measuring the user visible performance of a shared drive from a NAS or PC turns out to be a challenge. To simplify this task, Intel has developed and distributed the Intel® NAS Performance Toolkit.

Tests with the toolkit show there is a need to improve current home NAS products to provide users with a more local-like experience when using a NAS. Intel is producing high performance processors and working with NAS vendors to help them meet this objective.

Whole home storage will provide compelling benefits to people who find themselves challenged by their growing media collections and frustrated that their digital media is stranded on islands of devices. Whole home storage will have the additional advantage of relieving uncertainty about how to reliably archive precious family photos and videos as well as premium content purchased on the Internet.

With whole home storage, consumers will be free to add new media files to their libraries and connect new devices to their home networks, secure in the knowledge that accessing a file anywhere on the network is as easy as finding that same file on the local hard drive of their PC or other device. Consumers will also be free to enjoy media within their home as they please. It will become routine to “place shift,” or view favorite pictures, music or videos on any device, anywhere in the home without having to physically move or organize the media files.

Based on our research findings with people around the world, we are prototyping a whole home storage architecture that we call Home Media Aggregation. We believe such technologies will fundamentally shift the way people think about and interact with their digital media and devices. This concept has the potential to bring tremendous value to consumers, content providers and the CE industry.

Sources for Figure 1
Cumulative Networked Home Devices: International Data Corp. 2005 – 2009 “Home Networking Forecast and Analysis”, ABI Research 2005 “Portable Audio, Video and Game Market Evolution”, JP Morgan (Sept 7, 2005)

Cumulative Home Data: The Diffusion Group Dec. 2004 “Consumer Interest in NAS”, In-Stat October 2005 “Consumer Network Storage”, Parks Associates Q1 2005 “Digital Rights Content Ownership and Distribution”, The Diffusion Group August 2005 “The DNA of the Digital Home: Trends in Digital Home Storage”, In-Stat October 2005 “Consumer Network Storage”, In-Stat Sept 2005 “DVD Recording Habits Change: Non-PC Recording Popular”

*Legal Information  |  Privacy Policy

©2007 Intel Corporation