Compliance Hoists Holograph Hopes

Holographic data storage, which uses beams of light to copy and store data on optical disks, may be the future of data archiving, according to a handful of startups claiming support from the U.S. government and a range of top storage suppliers.

One company, InPhase Technologies Inc., for example, says the need to comply with new government regulations is driving SAN and NAS vendors to seek new methods of storing data that are even faster than disk. "It's been our biggest area of focus over the last nine months," says InPhase spokesman Chris Pfaff.

The company's Website says regulatory compliance represents a $12 billion potential annual market (presumably worldwide). OEMs interested in using InPhase's holographic products for compliance offerings include server vendors as well as SAN suppliers. Holographic storage "is the next-generation, high-capacity, secure, removeable media," Pfaff says.

While not naming the SAN OEMs, the startup, whose board includes Mike Gustafson, the former exec from McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA) who now heads up BlueArc Corp. (see Gustafson Leads Exec Carousel), claims the first data storage library system based on its holographic drives and media will be available through partner Asaca/Shibasoku Corp. of America (ASA) within the next year.

InPhase, which spun out of Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: LU) in 2000, says its holographic disks hold 200 Gbytes of data and support throughput rates of 20 Mbytes/second. The media will sell for about $40 (less than $0.25 per Gbyte), acoording to Pfaff.These figures compare favorably with those of today's magnetic disk storage gear, which supports up to 100 Gbytes per disk and throughput rates to 40 Mbytes/second, and is priced from $3.50 to $20 per Gbyte. It also compares well with tape storage, which is slower than disk and can run up to $4 per Gbyte for some products.

The Longmont, Colo.-based InPhase has roughly $30 million in funding, about 12 customers, and about 60 employees. Backers include Hitachi Maxell Ltd., Imation Corp., and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to name just a few. Partners include Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE) and Pegasus Disk Technologies, which has developed the file system and media management software for InPhase's Tapestry drive, due to ship in volume in 2005.

InPhase isn't the only holographic storage startup, either. Competitors, albeit with more modest claims to fame right now, include Aprilis Inc., a Massachusetts company that is talking to a range of Asian disk drive makers about adopting its holographic media; and Optware, a company based in Japan that specializes in holographic disks for video storage.

Analysts say it's important to note that while holographics may have a future in archiving -- a.k.a. cold storage -- it may not have much future in the hotter storage of SANs per se. Analyst Paul Holister of NanoMarkets, a consulting company, labels holographics "just another data storage system," the use of which will be driven by need for "greater archival volumes."

"Certainly [holographic data storage] is not going to play a part in the more sophisticated aspects of SANs, which will continue to revolve around magnetic media, I suspect," Holister writes in an email today.Another analyst, who requested anonymity, notes that compliance may finally raise interest in holographics enough to bring it out of the realm of a lab curiosity. "Holographic storage has been just around the corner for years now. The problem is always one of price performance relative to magnetic media," he writes in an email. "When we finally hit the wall, holographic storage will start to move to the forefront and become more than an interesting technology."

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch