Makers of new blue laser optical disk technology said this week that they have their sights firmly set on enterprise archiving applications currently handled by magnetic tape and even some nearline disk storage arrays.

But those same vendors are quick to admit that consumers must first warm up to the higher-capacity DVD formats before enterprises will accept them as products with enough longevity for their infrastructures.

Pioneer Electronics plans to release its first Blu-ray Disk in three weeks, Sony Corp. plans to ship its media by the end of this month, and Dell Inc. plans to launch its first Blu-ray-compatible desktop computer by midyear. Pioneer’s Blu-ray DVD disk drive will sell for $995 for a single platter disk with 25GB capacity. 

Sony Europe’s Recording Media and Energy division announced yesterday that its first Blu-ray Disk media will ship in Europe this month. The single-layer BD-RE (Blu-ray Disc Rewritable) media will be available next week and single-layer write-once BD-R (Blu-ray Disc Recordable) media will be available in April. Sony will launch dual-layer discs later this year. The single-layer BD-R and BD-RE discs offer a storage capacity of 25GB.

The new-generation media support 2X speed, which equates to a data transfer rate of 72Mbit/sec., making the discs suitable for video recording as well as data storage and file backup.

Toshiba Corp. also said yesterday that it is planning to launch its first laptop computer with an HD-DVD drive in Europe next month (See "Toshiba plans HD-DVD laptop for April").

HD-DVD and Blu-ray are two formats vying to replace current DVDs for high-definition content such as movies. Today’s DVDs can hold about 4.7GB of data, while Blu-ray Disk has a capacity of 25GB and HD-DVD can hold 15GB.