CDR Sam

Holographic Recordable Optical Media

April 29, 2009 | Data Storage

The New York Times  had an article about GE and it’s great breakthrough with holographic optical media.  This new format sports 300GB storage. The BBC also had an article about the GE Breakthrough

Now GE is not the only one in this field nor is anything new about this.

InPhase technologies Tapestry holographic system is actually deployed in Beta for at least a year and provides 300GB storage with 50 year archive  lifetime. 800GB just around the corner.  Where are the articles?    Who cares about GE anyway?

This has been the holy grail of optical storage for a long time with the promise of infinite storage / permanent archive. Unfortunately other technologies such as magnetic hard drives, solid state hard drives, flash and tape have all been expanding rapidly in native storage.  Now you don’t even need a physical device to backup data: it can be backed up to a cloud computing system.  So where in this mix does optical still have advantages over near-line and off-line storage?

Optical discs provide several advantages over the other near-line and off-line storage. Backup and archiving is not a single layer of storage technology but an onion with many layers of protection. I mean that you have to develop your strategy around your hard drive array (your on-line storage).  Running a RAID array for fault tolerance is an excellent first layer of defense.   The next layer would be a snapshot device like a optical disc archive.  The final layer being a tape backup which backs up the entire system.  Snapshot backups allow for quick restoration points in a network. As most of us know it is far easier restoring from a hierarchical data set then tape which requires a complete restore which is extremely time consuming and disruptive.

This is really where optical storage shines and the promise of greater capacity storage through recordable Blu-ray and holographic disc storage is necessary given the limitations of DVD for data storage.  Look to InPhase Technologies and not GE