300 gigabytes in the size of a DVD?

Rollie Hawk writes "Although storage space is no longer the premium it once was, physical backups and external media have been slow to catch up. While recordable DVDs may be fine for backing up a single workstation, large servers are still forced to rely on swappable drives and tape backups. But holographic disc technology could be changing all of that in the very near future. Holographic Versatile Discs (HVDs) have been in the works for some time now by various companies, including InPhase Technologies (formerly part of Lucent) and Japan's Optware (which claimed to have made the first recording of a movie on a holographic disc last year). InPhase's HVDs, scheduled for release in 2006, are said to hold 300GB of data, 60 times that of a conventional DVD with only a slight increase in size. That translates to more than a day's worth of HD-quality video. Not to mention the drives themselves can read and write at ten times the speed a normal DVD drive. One of InPhase's partners in HVD research, Maxell, is working towards even more storage on a 1.6TB disc."

Comments

~Chicken and egg?

[dada21]

Turner Network Television recently aired a commercial off of the InPhase Tapestry drive. Maxell built that drive for InPhase.

Data backup has become very expensive for some of my customers. The amount of data a company of even minimal size (50 employees) goes through in a day blows my mind. We've been investing every option but none are cost effective (except when a hard drive goes).

My dilemma is that as backup storage (such as the HVD) gets bigger, it seems that hard drives quickly outpace the new form of backup storage. 1.6TB discs sound great, yet I'm weary of having that much data on an easy to break/burn/steal disc. 300GB is more feasible as I can see making a few copies of the backup "just in case."

Nonetheless, the write speeds listed don't seem all that great, and what interfaces will let us copy data at those speeds? Moving 1.6TG of data off of a server without slowing down user access (24 hours per day with offshore employees) sounds like it will still take hours and hours to back up (if not longer). A recovery stage would take even longer.

For now, I'm happiest with redundancy backups. I don't like mirroring or RAIDx/y or clusters (too many nightmares over the 15 years I've worked with all of it), but having a server dupe itself daily has given us the best turnover and safety margins we've seen, as well as being very cost effective compared to use-once media or (shudder) tapes.

Re:~Chicken and egg?

[Apparition-X]

Well, full disclosure first: this is what I do all day, every day. Backup and recovery, that is.

So a few comments, because some of your thoughts worry me a bit:

Backup is expensive. Backup is insurance. Ideally you never need to recover, which means that all that money spent on backup is "wasted". That is life. It is an operational cost of doing business, that many businesses pay because they recognize that the risk of not having one outweighs the expense of doing it. But there it is. And I do recognize that smaller businesses (less than 1000 employees) usually have a harder time understanding the costs and justifying them. So how do you define "cost effective" in backup? There is no conceivable way that it can be run as a profit center and make money. Backups cost the business money, just like their insurance policy. How much is your data worth? That is the core question. How much is it worth? How much will you lose if you don't have access to it for some period of time?

Point number two is that the massively dominant mechanism for backup today is tape. I would venture to guess that 99.9% of business with more than 1000 employees backup to tape. And it is easy to break, burn, and steal. Again, that is life. We implement reasonable measures to ensure that it doesn't happen, but best practices say to make two copies of any tape: one for onsite, one for off. And yes, if you are concerned about data security (credit card transaction processors, banks, etc.) encrypt the tape. Yes it is expensive, and yet it is worth it. It is not "cost effective" except when you think that you may be out of business if your courier blows it, looses the tape, and the world finds out; just ask CardSystems Solutions. That is the context in which cost effective needs to be understood.

Further, what interfaces let you copy data at those speeds? Well there are more options than I can outline in this post: multiple SAN interfaces? Multiple LAN segments? RAID array snapshots? Host based mirroring? etc. Lots of options, all with good and bad things about them. But again, RAID arrays are used by 99.9% of businesses with more than 1000 employees. Server duplication is *not* backup. It may suffice for disaster recovery, but it has two enormous problems: it does not preserve data as it used to be at a given point in time (say, at financial quarter end), and it does propogate errors. Corrupted tablespace? You just replicated corruption. User just deleted files? While they just got deleted remotely too. Redundancy accomplishes several things, but none of them are backup. No auditor would be satisfied with that, and if they company is traded publicly, the CIO would likely be fired if that strategy was revealed to the public.

*yawn*

[Tyler Eaves]

This stuff has been a year or two away as long as I can remember. Someone wake me up when product actually ships...

Million Bit Parallel Data Access

[peterdaly]

It's not just that it's a fast drive. It goes well beyond the current method of spinning the disc faster and(or) putting the data closer together to increase performance.

"Unlike other technologies, that record one data bit at a time, holography allows a million bits of data to be written and read in parallel with a single flash of light," says Liz Murphy, of InPhase Technologies. "This enables transfer rates significantly higher than current optical storage devices."

That's pretty wild for a single "head" drive. I wonder if this could translate into devices similar to hard drives using similar methods. Hard disks are what I feel is holding back system performance. It's almost always the biggest bottleneck in a system, and has been more or less at a platoe for years, mainly because magnetic media can only do so much in a serial manor.

-Pete

Does size matter?

[Red Flayer]

Is 300 GB necessary? From a content producer standpoint, I don't want to be able to fit that much content on a single disc... then I can't charge as much for the special 4-disc pre-Christmas release edition.

From a consumer standpoint, I don't need this either, unless I want to archive all my files, in which case it's easier (and cheaper) to have a second hard drive.

I understand there is demand for high-volume storage solutions, but I can't see a mass market for them...

What I do see being very, very useful is the speed upgrade for r/w -- especially for gaming, but I'm sure this applies to other areas as well.

IMO, though, I don't see a big enough demand for this to become profitable for quite a long time -- especially if Bluray or HD-DVD is 'good enough' for the average user.

ASICs

[Andy Dodd]

Plenty of people already do error correction at line speed on gigabit communications links with low power costs. To someone developing coding schemes, storage devices can just be modeled as another communications channel.

Slight Change in Size?

[DaedalusLogic]

Even if it is a small change in physical size for the media I'm not too hot on that. I like how our DVD storage is the same size as the previous generation of CDs. The result is that all of my data recorded on CD-R from 8 years ago is still readable and I use it from time to time on our new drives... You can't say that for many other optical or magnetic storage media of odd sizes. Zip Disks, SuperDisks, Jaz Drives... Maybe they're going for a different market, but you think these folks would leave their options open.

There are also good things to be said about leaving the past behind, and not keeping the same physical form factor.

Opinions?

Re:It Won't see light of day: Thank you Hollywood

[wpiman]

It is quite possible now that standards could be developed where they simple ignore the US market. Certainly it is the biggest in the world right now- but if they got flack from the RIAA/MPAA cronies in Congress-- they could simply say- ok- you can't have this great technology. They could sell in Japan, Europe, China, India, etc.... Companies and individuals would see these things saving money/time provided by this media in their overseas operations-- and then they would start hitting their Congresspeople ever harder than the media industry ever could.

What?

[george_slater]

I'm a little confused by some of the responses I'm seeing here. It seems most people think that this new technology would be a bad thing? The largest complaint I've seen so far is: "What if I lose the disk?" I don't know about you guys, but for me this isn't much different then anything else in the world. If your backup is important... don't lose it!

If needed, I have some handy solutions to solve the "How do I not lose my disk" problem.

1. Put it some place that you can remember.
2. If it's super important, make two backups.
3. Tie a string around your finger to remind you to always remember where you put your disk.
4. Ask somebody more responsible than yourself to watch over it for you.

And if none of these work...

5. Buy a small cable. Run the cable through the hole in the center of the disk. Buy a small padlock. Padlock the cable around a large object. Make multiple copies of the padlock key and tape them in various places.

Obviously this is not practical, but it is about as practical as thinking that a new technology is bad because you might misplace it.