Lenovo Introduces Personal Storage Based Beacon Home Cloud

While everyone, nowadays, is talking about remote storage, rented spaces, and outsourced infrastructure, Lenovo is once again leveraging local or home storage with its all new invention Beacon Home Cloud. This was announced at the year’s biggest tech event, CES 2014.

This is not the first time as Lenovo is coming with a local storage device with terabytes of storage capacity. In 2009, it introduced IdeaCentre D400, which was unable to mark a success point. Although there were other certain reasons behind the failure of D400, one of the key issues was its ability to run with only the first version of Microsoft Windows Home Server. The product did not entail any successor version for Windows Home Server 2011.

Specifications:

Beacon Home Cloud itself has a brains of dual core Intel Atom processor. Moreover, the basic device having Intel Atom CE5315 is also accompanied by 1 GB of DDR3 RAM. This basic storage as well as computing devices will hold two separate hard drives, each of 3 TB storage capacity, totaling up to 6 TB.

Connectivity:

Home Cloud allows different forms of connectivity. With the help of embedded 802 11b/g/n Wi-Fi adapter, the storage drives can be accessed using an authorized wireless network. Empowered with Bluetooth 4.01, it becomes easily controllable with remote and handy devices. A gigabit Ethernet port can assure a reliable and faster transferability of data to or from the device. Apart from all these, a USB 3.0 port allows you to connect other hard drives, digital cameras, and USB supported devices for exchanging data.

Multimedia:

Lenovo Beacon Home Cloud comes with HDMi abilities, which means, you can easily stream the multimedia content directly from the storage on to your television screens, without using streamer clients.

Controls:

To handily control this device, Lenovo has developed an Android application. Install this application on your Android smartphones or tablets and turn them into a remote controller. This is a multi-functional application that will also help the users to share and access files and data using their portable devices. At the initial launch, the device is not said to support Apple’s iOS7. However, it has not yet been confirmed whether it will be compatible with Apple’s Time Capsule backup technology.

Competition:

Lenovo will not be the only one offering a local storage device with remote storage capabilities. In contrast to it, Western Digital has already launched its similar kind of product, named as WD’s My Cloud. It also has many, but relatively less features than those of Beacon Home.

Pricing:

The announced price of Lenovo Beacon Home Cloud is said to be $199, when it ships. However, it ships without hard drives. Supplying the two hard drives of # TB each will elevate the cost to a significant level. These prices are much higher as compared to the Western Digital’s My Cloud, which is offered at a lowest price of $150.

It is due to the data safety and security concerns of outsourced cloud networks that a big name like Lenovo is acquainting people with choices. The local cloud storage can have its own firewall patterns, making it a securer.