Holographic Storage to Become Available Later This Year

At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, a number of storage product makers were present, despite the obvious profile of the event held in Las Vegas, Nevada, between 8 and 11 of January. Among those storage companies, InPhase Technologies is the one that promised to provide consumers with a new solution that would likely be used in the professional storage market, offering the possibility of creating archives that could last for an impressive 50 years. The solution basically takes advantage of a holographic technology, which has been integrated in the company's 300GB Tapestry drive.

 

The development of the aforementioned product started sometime in the year 2000, at the venture capital-backed InPhase. However, since then the company has announced a series of potential product releases and debut of shipments, all of which have been delayed, mostly due to the effects of the recession. As a consequence, people aware of the project started to express their fears that it would be abandoned and that the 300GB Tapestry drive wouldn't see the light of day in the storage market.

 

However, according to a recent statement, on the part of the company's CEO, Nelson Diaz, InPhase could be announcing the production of its Tapestry drive sometime later this year. In addition, InPhase and Ikegami are expected to demonstrate video workflow, using Tapestry holographic storage, at the US National Association of Broadcasters show, NAB 2009, due to debut in April in Las Vegas.

 

According to the available specifications, the InPhase drives use holograms to store data on an optical disk, featuring a 20MB/s transfer speed. InPhase's Tapestry drives are expected to provide for a 50-year lifespan, which has drawn the attention of motion picture studios and other film media companies that need to store movie and video files for long periods of time.

 

“We need to protect data for 100 years, but I'd settle for 50," said Wendy Aylsworth, senior vice president of Technology at Warner Brothers Technical Operations, in a talk at the Storage Visions Conference located in Las Vegas with CES, as reported by Enterprise Storage.