Opternity Knocks

You probably haven't heard of Opternity, a start-up company that promises a new "laser" tape technology for enterprise space that increases the capacity of a tape cartridge by nearly an order of magnitude, or 10 times, that of existing tape technology for the same media cost while at the same time dramatically increasing the tape's shelf life to fifty years. Why is this important? Consider first all the predictions about the continuing deluge of data. To paraphrase Mark Twain on the weather (and to exaggerate a bit), everyone talks about innovation, but nobody does anything about it. If Opternity misses its opportunity, we may all be missing an opportunity, but we won't know it.

One of the big characteristics of much of that new data is that it is "persistent," meaning that it should or must be stored permanently. Yes, sensor data, such the use of RFID, may create voluminous amounts of data, but a lot of this is ephemeral information that may be retained for only seconds or minutes. Yes, data retention policies may be put in place for some data, such as e-mails retained only for a certain period of time and then deleted. However, much of the data businesses create or acquire each year will simply be kept and added to data from prior years that has not been deleted.

Note also that the vast bulk of this data is fixed content that will never change and that the pattern of access for the data follows a long-tailed (active in the beginning, then trailing off over time) distribution. Some portion of this information, perhaps even the vast majority, will never be accessed again, but some may be recalled for whatever reason. Predicting which data will be recalled may very well be very difficult if not impossible. Yet that information still qualifies as production data in the sense that it has to be recoverable "online." That means users can recall the data without outside assistance, although recovery is almost assuredly not in the sub-second or seconds range associated with data that is active and subject to change.

In conventional solutions, that class of data is placed in an active archive consisting of production data still available online but which resides on more cost-effective storage media. The first choice for these environments is capacity disk, such as 500GB to 1+TB SATA, in contrast to performance disk, such as FC or SAS. However, even capacity disk may provide higher performance and concomitant higher cost than is needed. Magnetic tape can also serve as an active archive repository for this data. If the data needs to be recalled, a copy can be put on disk and used there. Ffor example, StorNext from Quantum provides that capability.

Is that the end of the story? To date, magnetic tape has defined the most logical conclusion, but Opternity has come up with an alternative technology that extends tape media to an even more cost-effective tier of storage.What Needs Huge Amounts of Bulk Storage
Modern magnetic tape cartridges have quite a bit of native capacity, say 800 GB going to 1.6 TB shortly. Is there a need for much larger capacity? As some requirements for bulk storage go into the petabyte and above range, the answer may be yes. Consider just a couple of possible uses:

Something New, Something Old
Opternity is introducing optical tape as a "new" technology. Optical storage is, of course, nothing new, but laser recording on thin film media, i.e. optical or laser tape is. The creators of Opternity's optical tape happen to have a strong, track record as they were the inventors of recordable, optical storage at Philips/CDC. And every time you use a CD or DVD, you know how well-proven that technology is! Opternity has built a working model proving the laser tape concept and demonstrating the capacity increase.

Opternity's first objective for its patented technology is to develop a Reference Design and manufacture multiple prototype units for which it needs funding. The company then plans to create a Laser Media Trust (LMT) consortium whose member licensees would develop the actual optical tape drives and optical media. Opternity would probably derive most of its revenues from royalty sales.

According to Opternity, the proposed laser tape drives could work within existing LTO libraries, which means that customers would only have to buy tape drives and media. It also means that customers could continue to use their existing tape libraries with LTO-based products for standard purposes, such as backup, but could also use LMT-based products to support ultra-high-capacity, active archiving requirements. Overall, that ability to work with LTO libraries is a considerable benefit as it hugely reduces the barrier to entry for optical tape, as no switching costs are incurred for tape libraries.

The Challenge Opternity Faces
Opternity is at that stage of its lifecycle where it needs initial funding, though really not that much to get started relative to other manufacturing startups. But getting money in still difficult economic times is not easy. Consider this:

So where does that leave Opternity? As with any new and untested technology, the prospects for optical tape are highly uncertain. However, even though new IT solutions tend to take longer and cost more money to bring to market than anticipated, Opternity's laser tape would seem to be a product that can be successfully delivered in a real manufacturing environment, in contrast to hypothetical products like holographic storage. Yes, there are sales and marketing risks, as well, but nothing that seems insurmountable.

Still a question often raised in circumstances like this is what is the addressable market? For Opternity the answer has two parts. The first is that two or three licensees can probably find enough revenue and profitability to justify their risk of entering the market in the first place. The second is that in some cases, the existence of a product where none had existed before can create a larger addressable market. In the case of Opternity, organizations may decide that a low-cost, non-volatile storage technology will allow them to keep information they might once have thrown away. Such a technology could benefit numerous organizations, including NASA and other budget-beleaguered agencies. And, if that is the case, then Opternity and its optical tape licensees may find themselves doing very well indeed.Why am I so much on Opternity's bandwagon? The reason is simple. Opternity represents the challenges that many companies face in converting innovation into real manufactured products. To paraphrase Mark Twain on the weather (and to exaggerate a bit), everyone talks about innovation, but nobody does anything about it. If Opternity misses its opportunity, we will all be missing an opportunity, but we won't know it. And that is because data will be thrown away, such as NASA is doing now, that might have value if it could be stored at an efficient enough cost, or data will not be collected because it is too expensive to store it, which could be a real problem if it delays something as important as epigenome research. We don't know for certain if that will be the case, but do we really want Opternity not to have an opportunity at least?