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Holographic Storage Slated to Hit Market This Fall
prostoalex writes "The Guardian takes a look at the current developments in the world of holographic storage. Despite being available in research for over 40 years, the technology is getting commercialized only now, with InPhase Technologies launching its 600 GB write-once disk and a drive this fall. What avout the price? "The first holographic products are certainly not mass-market — a 600GB disc will cost around $180 (£90), and the drive costs about $18,000. Potential users include banks, libraries, government agencies and corporations.""
From the article: Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this. When you have a multi-Terabyte system to backup AND verify within a short window (say 4 hours), speed trumps price just about every time. What is the cost of NOT having a backup? ZombieEngineer
Because magnetic media fails, badly, often, and at any time.
It is in NO way a long term backup solution.
Wow, a real product. Every time I read about holographic storage, particularly on Slashdot, it's in the same sort of context in which you'd read about quantum computing or Star Trek-style teleportation. Like this: "Scientists at (fill in name of university) have managed to get (name of particle) to (some verb), a first step toward what could one day be practical (quantum computing, space elevators, carbon nanotube frisbees, or whatever). They used a (system you'd never be able to afford) to (do something even your grandkids won't be able to do), and predict that the process will be commercially viable in (about the same amount of time it will take us all to get cold fusion reactors installed in our cars)." Nice to see something like this actually come to market!
Because magnetic media fails, badly, often, and at any time.
It is in NO way a long term backup solution.
And you don't expect the first generation of this system to fail?! Heh.
Magnetic doesn't fail as much as you make it sound. We have 100s of TB backed up on 400 GB Tivoli tapes and rarely lose a tape. If we do, its not the media itself... a pin from a tape will get stuck in the drive (from the tape being mishandled -- someone dropped it a few times.) The media itself is still usable.
BTW... our tapes run about $50 each. You can find a 20 TB tape library for under $9K. And yes, it is a long term solution. We've had our Tivoli/ADSM products for 15 years.... and they still work (and so do the tapes.)
Put an ad in the NY-time with the SHA-sum of your hard-disc, and you've got pretty good proof 5 years from now that it's been unchanged ever since.
I don't know about that... Five years is a long time to find a hash collision. So what happens to your strategy when a weakness is announced? Do you tell your auditors that it was good enough five years ago?
Let's put it another way... You give me a SHA1 hash and five years. If the money's right, I'll give you back a dataset that matches that hash within that five years... (Point: a hash is a strong indication, but not a lock...)
So says you.
Bleeding edge is always a ridiculous expense. The people who are willing to be there already know who they are. That you even raise this question means that you are not.
OTOH, neither am I, but that's not the point. The point is, this is the first commercial volley of a new technology, which means that a few years hence it will be cheaper with even higher data densities.
Meaning, potentially, something like the entire run of every season of every Star Trek series ever... on one disc.
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
One potential use I can think of is selling/renting really high definition movies, TV series or collections of movies. For example, 10 seasons of "Friends" in ultra high definition would surely take up a lot of space. For that use a single disc with a huge capacity is perfect.
The disc in question is much more elegant and cool than a stack of bulky, noisy hard disks. Elegant and cool may sound petty, but they sell for certain kinds of people with too much money. They even sell RCA cables for more than $18,000.
I hope InPhase can net some capital on their end so they can work on lowering the price.
I can see installing an autochanger using Inphase Tapestry based technology as a dedicated solution in large corporations to permanently archive large amounts of data. This would be installed side-by-side with existing technologies such as DLT 600 tape which would be used for rewritability.
I'm just glad to see something on the market after the decades of idle promises on holographic storage.
Is amusing. It's got the pointless wave abstract graphics I usually see on sites with nothing to say (now, of course, I'm not claiming this, these guys seem serious in general).
Their slogan is "data at the speed of light". Because, they use lasers and holographic technology, do you get it? It's a very smart slogan.
But the reason I'm writing this post is this site reminded me of the International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies (IAVRT) which was supposed to bring Neuronet upon us, and they wamnted to fund this by selling "neuronet domains". They have shut down for a "few weeks" until they hit some major partnerships. Quite some months have passed since.
Check their domain page still with the same message (and notice the uncanny similarities in design with InPhase Technologies):
Wavy green lines header
Bottom line is, wavy green lines aren't very convincing, we need high res demos of icy cubes storing TB of data, come on!
Nobody is saying that one of these should be an entire backup solution. But if i have a 3TB database that needs to archived, i'd much rather use 5 of these than 4616 CDs, 639 DVDs, or even 15 ultrium tapes.
Data is getting so (too?) big that we NEED things this size just to be able to physically manage it all in any sort of convenient way.
-- D-23994, Muff#2613
This product has been "Coming Soon" for a couple of years now. I think this is the third or fourth time this no-product startup has gotten an article posted on Slashdot. It is slow (180Mb/s is in no way "fast), under-capacity (600GB is a waste of time), overpriced, and unproven. If you want near-line storage, use SATA, if you want archival, use tape. I don't see much of a market for this thing.
SirWired
We've been doing this for a few years actually, as a "roll your own" solution. We currently use removable drive carriers from DataStor, and 500 GB Seagate disks (first ATA, now SATA). We also use foam-padded locking carriers that are take off-site every day. We do ~1.2 TB of backups every night, and have had exactly one drive failure in 4 years.
We actually back up to a large fixed disk array using various backup software from multiple systems, and then make an encrypted copy all of those files to the removable disks using 7-ZIP. We then pad the empty space on the removable drives with Par2 data if possible (we compute as much data as our window allows, currently about 20% redundancy). We also store unencrypted binaries (and source if possible) of all the software needed for recovery with each backup.
We have not evaluated any of the commerial "disk to disk" backup solutions, as ours has proven simple and reliable, and all we need is an SATA- or USB2-equipped machine to begin recovery. Most of the commercial hardware solutions require you to have a similar (proprietary) unit at the recovery site.
Wasn't the trick behind holographics that a part of the pattern could be used to reconstruct the entire pattern? That would make restoring the data on a dropped (and shattered) holographic cube much more convenient..
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
As pegr pointed out, there cannot be an unbreakable hash and hashes may only buy you time.
However as someone else pointed out, if you divulge further information on your file, while it won't make it impossible to have a different file with the same hash, it will make far less likely that someone can bring out a file with the same hash that also has that same length, is a valid bzip2 stream and, after decompression, has the same internal structure (is a valid OOo document). There is a finite number of files with a given length and thus, a finite number of hash collisions at that same file length. If none of the collisions is also a valid bzip2 stream that encodes a valid OOo file, you have, effectively, a pretty much as-good-as-it-gets almost-unforgeable dataset.
Of course, the vestigial mathematician inside me says that, in order to create that unforgeable hash plus the set of rules the file must conform to in order to be considered authentic, you will have to disclose a volume of information equal or larger than the file itself.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
No, unfortunately this is incorrect. bzip2 probably will ignore data after the end of the stream, plus it has future usage blocks that are likely ignored. OOo also has areas that are ignored by the editor. (I'm generalizing, I didn't check either program, but many - can I say most? - programs have such areas.)
Using those areas you can add whatever padding data you need to "fix" the hash after adding your fake data.
Recording the file length makes it harder, true. But if you are the one generating the hash you can pre-padd the data to give you a space later for this manipulation.
Have a look: http://www.cits.rub.de/MD5Collisions/ the page has links to two postscript files with identical MD5's. Quite different content though.
-Ariel
I really don't see this catching on. I don't think businesses are ready to ditch their tried and true tape libraries for a brand new technology that hasn't been proven in the enterprise yet. It makes much more sense to buy a nice LTO autoloader which can be had for $3000-5000, and 400GB/800GB tapes are around $60 a pop. Tapes can be long lasting given that they are stored correctly. If these holographic drives can reach more competitive price levels, to the point where it's cheaper than an LTO system then we can talk.
You obviously responded without reading my whole comment (tsk...tsk!).
Alright, so say you buy the $18,000 drive and 200 discs as $180 a piece. You spend a couple of months saving all your highly valuable data, put it in a vault and wait a 30 years. BUT, the next year, the company that created the $18,000 and their proprietary storage goes belly up because there aren't enough fools to spend so much on a new technology without having any guarantee that it will last when the purpose of the backups it to last . By last I mean there being way to get the data back. In 5 years the $18k drive gets full of dust and dies and 20 years down the road you want to access your document -- what do you do?