Media server company Autonomic could sell an SSD-based...

Media server company Autonomic could sell an SSD-based server within the next 12-18 months, CEO Michael de Nigris, told Consumer Electronics Daily in an interview Thursday. “We're watching that market very closely, de Nigris said. The cost benefit of solid-state drives is still a “little bit out of skew with magnetic hard drives,” especially given the company’s ability to back up to the cloud and to other locations, he said, which makes “redundancy less of a concern,” he said. If Autonomic’s audio server were a standalone device with no backup facility, the company would go the SSD route quicker, and “dealers would probably be willing to pay the premium to have it” for the reliability, he said. Cost per gigabyte of SSD is “still quite high,” but the company will “arrive there when the time is right,” he said. De Nigris anticipates a “pretty rapid decline” in the price of SSDs as more tablets, smartphones and computers with SSD storage hit the market. Autonomic announced Thursday it has expanded into an 8,000-square-foot fulfillment facility in Armonk, N.Y., that will complement its West Coast shipping center and improve shipping speed to dealers on the East Coast, de Nigris said. Component manufacturing for semiconductors and hard drives is done in China with assembly handled in Armonk and the company’s California facility, he said. The company recently released the Mirage Media Server MMS-5A for single- and multi-room audio distribution. The MMS-5A synchs with other Mirage servers in different locations, along with offering remote library access from around the world, according to literature. The MMS-5 will get an update to support video, and the company has “something in the wings” for later this year that will be previewed at CEDIA, de Nigris said.