InPhase Moves Out of Phase

InPhase Technologies, a spinout of Lucent Technologies that has been developing holographic storage technology for eight years now, is experiencing further delays in delivering its drives.

The Longmont, Colorado-based startup, which has been predicting shipment dates since 2006, is now pushing the delivery date ahead somewhat indefinitely.

When InPhase received a round of $20 million back in January 2008 (bringing its total funding to about $95 million), word was the drives and media would ship this summer. Now, though, production difficulties are forcing a change of plan -- again.

"They're involved in a phased buildout of drives. They... can't guarantee that all the drives would work," says Bart Stuck of Signal Lake, an investor in InPhase.

The problem apparently lies not in the core technology, but the manufacturing thereof. Stuck says, "they have the technology, the question is how many can they really build and ship... and have them all work?" He is certain the problem will be fixed in time for production shipments next year."There will be shipments throughout all of 2009 of drives and storage," he says. "The reality is that there will be four quarters of shipments. There is no change at all in the execution... The question is, when will there be shipments in 2008?"

Another investor, Stephen Socolof of New Venture Partners, had this to say in a recent email to Byte and Switch:

The release date remains fluid. Both 150-Gbyte and 300-Gbyte drives and their storage media are available in small quantities. Several resellers are still lined up, including Rorke Data and Japan's Ikegami. Time Warner reportedly tested InPhase's gear two years ago, and Panasonic is still in line to recommend it.

But InPhase has had to slow down its rollout. The company laid off "tens" of operations workers recently, bringing its census to about 70. The company has maintained in news reports that the layoff didn't affect more than 40 employees, however, since some affected workers were short-term contractors.

"To complete this engineering and the months of qualification testing required by the market, we expect final product release to be delayed until into 2009," admits Socolof in his email. "In the meantime, we do have, and plan to release, a number of prototype drives for our lead customers. Based on this new schedule, we did release some of the team who were focused on operations to support a scale-up of manufacturing. We will add these folks back to the team when we are ready to scale up. For now, the team numbers about 70, primarily engineering, who will continue to develop the drive."Holographic storage is a subset of optical storage that records data in multiple layers, instead of in a single layer. InPhase has demonstrated densities of as high as 515 gigabits per square inch in its lab, compared to around 20 gigabits per square inch for a Blu-ray disk. The company claims a 50-year lifespan for its technology.

Despite some early momentum, optical storage in general is viewed with some skepticism by enterprise customers. Nonetheless, vendors like InPhase, Powerfile, and others say various approaches will improve the efficiency of archives and help out primary and secondary storage for image-intensive businesses.

Bart Stuck says InPhase is still in line to make its mark. "No one has ever done this," he says. Until InPhase, Stuck insists, no one was ever successful in building working drives and storage media for commercial use.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.