Vendors give nod on DVD standard

Agreement means DVD Ram drives will hit market sooner than expected

The first appearance of recordable devices are set to reach dealers earlier than expected after a consortium of vendors agreed a standard for DVD Ram drives.

The consortium members are believed to include Toshiba, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Pioneer Electronics, Matsushita Electric and Time Warner. Sony and Philips Electronics, which both have interests in other CD technology, are understood to have abstained from the vote.

DVD Ram drives will enable users to record sound and images as opposed to DVD Roms, which can only play back.

DVD will probably appear first on PCs for business users as there are still a number of issues to be ironed out in the consumer market ? developers have to decide whether to support either or both the NTSC or PAL television standards, for example.

Toshiba was reported to be planning a launch of a DVD Ram drive by the end of the year for the business market. DVD Roms for PCs are already available in the US and Japan.

The company recently announced two DVD reference design tools, a DVD evaluation kit and a DVD design kit for PC OEMs and add-in card manufacturers. The evaluation kit includes a full-featured DVD decoder based on Toshiba?s DVD chipset, as well as a DVD Rom drive, a DVD sample disk and software device drivers.

J Storage vendor EMC has signed a deal with Siemens Nixdorf (SNI) that will see its Symmetrix range of storage products being sold with SNI servers. The deal will allow the EMC Symmetrix 3000 and 5000 range to be resold by SNI as the preferred storage systems to go with its mainframe and open platform servers.

The EMC deal follows SNI?s recent signing of Westcoast to distribute its desktop PC range (PC Dealer, 9 April).