Canadian manufacturer Curtiz Systems Corp. plans to launch a portable storage device designed to alleviate the problem of data leakage due to lost and stolen media, plus an extremely high-speed PC network interface card.
The Innerkip, Ont.-based firm gave IT World Canada an exclusive briefing on its spring product lineup.
The Arnie-Disk is designed to make it difficult to lose portable storage devices. The 6 GB portable storage device as large and as heavy as a barbell, said Curtiz’s president and chief executive officer, Richard Blain.
“Memory sticks and the floppy disks that preceded them are light,” Blain said. “But the Arnie-disk weighs 80 pounds, and you’ll be so sick and tired of carrying it around, it will be hard to forget it anywhere.”
The Arnie-disk is an interesting concept, said Victor Laszlo, an IT industry analyst for Renault Research Corp. of Plattsville, Ont.
“If you drop your memory stick, you might not even notice it,” Laszlo said. “But if you drop the Arnie-Disk, I guess you will notice it, especially if it lands on your foot.”
Curtiz also plans to ship CentaGig, a 100 Gigabit per second network interface card for personal computers.
“A few years ago, people said Gigabit to the desktop would never happen,” Blain said. “Well, it’s happened, and some applications are so computing-intensive, even a gigabit connection to the network isn’t enough.”
The CentaGig may be popular among computing-intensive research organizations, but it unlikely to sell well among the general business population, said Ilse Lund, vice-president for enterprise network infrastructure at Dooley-Wilson Information Group, a Maspeth, N.Y.-based research firm.
“Desktop PCs today are getting really powerful, but is their processing power so good enough to justify at 100-gig connection? I doubt it,” Lund said. “In fact, I have to wonder whether this isn’t an April Fool’s joke.”
