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.""

Comments

Good thinking

[niceone]

InPhase Technologies launching its 600 GB write-once disk and a drive this fall

Good thinking. I mean, if they were launching the disk without the drive (or even the other way round) it would be a lot less likely to succeed.

Re:Good thinking

[dkf]

The benefits for write-once media are actually pretty clear. Suppose you've got to keep audit trails for a database containing financial data; writing it to write-once media is a pretty good way of doing it, since it's then easy to show that it wasn't tampered with. Rewritable media is useful for other things (e.g. live data).

Re:Good thinking

[drgonzo59]

With 1TB hard drives hitting the market, is it really worth spending $180 for 1 (!) optical disk and a $18k for the drive? For that money one can buy a lot of 1TB hard drives and build a RAID 0/1/5... array and have more capacity and reliability. Besides, I don't see museums or even companies running to get that drive, because if the standard goes the way of the Laserdisc then they are stuck with some exotic technology experiment and when their drive breaks there they will not be able to easily get their data back.

Re:Good thinking

[islanduniverse]

I think the 600Gb storage capacity is a dead giveaway...

Re:Good thinking

[fbjon]

Why is this better than CD-R media?

1) Longevity/reliability
2) Transfer speed
3) (600 gigabytes) / (600 megabytes) = 1 024 times better

Re:Good thinking

[pegr]

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...)

Re:Good thinking

[dosquatch]

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.

Re:Good thinking

[Mr. Underbridge]

Good thinking. I mean, if they were launching the disk without the drive (or even the other way round) it would be a lot less likely to succeed.

Yeah, that would be like a game company shipping a console before any games are available for it. Err...wait...

Re:Good thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Longevity - reliably is still a To be determined

look at how long it took other media Manufactures to admit a finite and shorter life of their products.
Who would have ever though that magnetic media would ever last longer than optical media ?
but it's a fact today .

Re:Good thinking

[Ed Avis]

3) (600 gigabytes) / (600 megabytes) = 1 024 times better

You clearly haven't been reading Slashdot this morning. In fact it's only a lousy 1000 times better - clearly a rip-off by the optical disk makers to give you less capacity than you thought.

Re:Good thinking

[pegr]

However, what ar the odds that the dataset you produce will make sense in the given context?
 
Very high, actually. Presuming I have the original data to provide context, I can fiddle with white space, unallocated disk blocks, executables (since they are not likely to be executed from backup nor examined closely), whatever. Without the original data, then all bets are off. You have to assume an attcker would have access to the data in question.

Cryptoanalysis of SHA1 has already weakened it...

Re:Good thinking

[rbanffy]

Make that 20 years and your chances of reading a valid Excel 2007 file in Excel 2027 are every bit as small as a hash collision.

"What is a 'file', granpa?"

Re:Good thinking

[undercanopy]

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.

Re:Good thinking

[Thundersnatch]

The tape/HD size ratio is getting so ridiculous that at work we're seriously considering using Hard Drives as removable tape-like media for backup. Any other solution for backing up terabytes of data is too expensive.

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.

Re:Good thinking

[toQDuj]

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..

Re:Good thinking

[rbanffy]

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.

Re:Good thinking

[ars]

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.

Re:Good thinking

[drgonzo59]

Toss an autoloading platter jukebox onto the front of this and you can start long term archival recording of business documents (mortgage documents > 30 years).

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?

Re:Good thinking

[blueskies]

Good post. Except that LTO3 can store 400GB and LTO4 can store 800GB.

libraries?

[Anonymous Cowpat]

What kind of library has £9000 to spend on a single piece of computer hardware? It'd be substantially cheaper to buy a computer and four of those 1 TB hardisks that were mentioned yesterday, and they'd be rewritable!
Or they could spent the £9000 on, y'know, say... books.

Re:libraries?

[KokorHekkus]

A library isn't always a public lending library. Another type of libarary that could actually might have use for this type of storage solutions (not necessarily exactly this one) is what I would call historical research libraries. Their function is to protect the material and at the same time make it more accessible to people. It's not unusual for these libraries to have a serious digitizing projects so that the originals don't have to be disturbed (especially if they are physically deteriorated). Just the other week I heard a radio program about one of those digitizing projects.. they create digital material on a terabyte scale every week. They also used some pretty hefty scanners there... their newest machinge could scan one loose page into a high resolution image per second. I suspect that machine cost £9000 or perhaps more.

Re:libraries?

[PDAllen]

The type of library that is a copyright library (i.e. receives a copy of every published book) rather than a public library (which is what you are thinking of). Think about e.g. university libraries, the British Library, the Library of Congress, that sort of thing. Obviously a public lending library isn't going to want one of these things, but then you don't go to a public library when you want to find a bit of obscure data.

I'll pass

[cowscows]

If the storage medium is anything other than a small, transparent, and slightly iridescent cube; then I'm not interested. Discs are so 90's.

It is all about data transfer speed...

[ZombieEngineer]

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

Re:It is all about data transfer speed...

[fireboy1919]

Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this...speed trumps price just about every time.

I could be wrong, but are you implying that people will use this because it's got 160Mbit/sec write time? Keep in mind that this is 20MB/sec. That's a little low for the standard harddrive, and you can increase it by adding more drives in a sequential raid.
If that's the speed, then it absolutely isn't a good reason to use this.

The only advantage this actually has is information density. One 600GB disc is going to be pretty tiny compared to an array of harddrives designed to get the speed up.

Is that worth it for a library or bank? My inclination would be no. A couple hundred harddrives in a SAN is probably a better idea.

The market will be those individuals that absolutely, positively need the discs to be tiny, and nothing else matters. Because this tech isn't going to do anything else better than what we've already got.

Re:But why?

[yakumo.unr]

Because magnetic media fails, badly, often, and at any time.
It is in NO way a long term backup solution.

There is a need...

[msauve]

for a high density archival format, but I can't see where this even comes close.

The manufacturer rates it at 50 year archival life, with no specifics about how that number was derived (is that an average? guaranteed for every piece of media? until an error rate of "x" is encountered? under what storage conditions?).

It's a proprietary solution, from a single startup company - what are the odds that a reader is going to exist in 50 years? Note that the manufacturer specifically warns of a lack of backward compatibility when they state "Drive is backward read compatible for three generations; 18-24 months between generations." Having an archive of data which is inaccessible doesn't get you much.

Re:There is a need...

[mal0rd]

Thanks for finding the information I was just going to lookup on their website. 50 years may not be optimal, but it's a lot better then the only competitors, hard drives or burned DVDs, which usually fail under 10 years. The fact that it's write-once is another plus, since even software bugs can't damage the data.

Your other point is valid, but secondary. If your DVDs or HDDs have degraded beyond readability, they're useless no matter how many readers you have. And if the life-span of the reader is longer then the life-span of a DVD or HDD, then you don't even need to worry about availability, since you store a few readers along with the disc. With a standard interface like USB mass storage or SATA it'll surely still be usable for decades.

A real product?

[Random BedHead Ed]

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!

Re:A real product?

[squizzar]

I agree with the parent on this. At least it's not vapourware.

Always the same debate with new technologies, especially storage - too expensive, something else is better etc. etc. Goes all the way back to floppy disks vs. ethernet. The first hard drives were around 20Mb, and cost a lot more than the 15 or so floppies they replaced.

What would be great is if someone knowledgeable had a look at the technology and made an educated guess as to whether it will be cheap in mass production. I'm pretty sure the first CDR disks weren't cheap. Tapes still aren't that cheap given their simplicity and speed. A far more useful analysis would be whether this technology could be made cheap when mass produced. If it can then it is a contender, if not then it's a waste of time.

Re:A real product?

[osgeek]

We need go no further than Slashdot's search engine to nail these bozos: Same guys last year making claims that they were shipping that year. Here they are the year before along with some other crooks making claims. And earlier in 2005... why do they get so much play for vapor?

Ooh, here's a good one on some guy trying sucker people with funding for his spintronics drive that will bring miraculous storage to the masses. He already has pricing worked out!

While I'm sure that sooner or later one of these technologies will pan out and we'll see a product; it all looks like con men looking for sucker investor money so far. Don't give them any attention until they ship a product or at least a prototype to a magazine that can review their product to prove that it actually exists and seems to work.

Help me...

[Yonder Way]

...Obi-Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope!

Re:But why?

[Benosaurus]

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.)

Re:Next time I'll hit the preview button.

[Znork]

"speed trumps price just about every time."

Of course, you can build a multiterabyte disk-to-disk backup system with gigabit transferrates out of common of the shelf hardware for less than $1000.

The cost of having backups can certainly be made a lot less than $18000.

Ultra high definition media

[Koookiemonster]

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.

Forget the capacity...

[macraig]

... holographic storage will be soooo much better for saving pr0n.

Good looking technology.

[mlts]

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.

Their site

[suv4x4]

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!

This is STILL just worthless, and vapor...

[sirwired]

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

Re:Next time I'll hit the preview button.

[Znork]

With ten years experience working with enterprise class mission critical systems, I've seen those arguments (and those systems) many times. And yet in my experience, the 'rated uptimes' seem to be some definition of 'when the system is up and working the uptime will be 6 9's', because between everything from bugs through randomly incompatible hardware through firmware upgrades through operator (yes, the vendors own certified technicians) error, the actual on-line time for that kind of system usually isnt even close to the standalone COTS systems we have.

That rather jives with the recent article here on slashdot on MTBF of consumer grade v.s enterprise grade disks. Turns out the consumer disks MTBF was actually accurate, and the enterprise grade MTBF was in reality the same as the consumer grade, despite being stated as being twice as much.

And dont even get me started on disk subsystem based remote copy software. If you really need it because there is no other way to create offsite redundancy then so many system design errors have been made that the software is more or less impossible to secure and should be scrapped and redesigned from scratch. Which I'd venture is why they charge so much for it.

"When the cost of not having a backup restored for 1 hour can be in 7 figures, never mind if its down for a day, then 18k for a drive is pocket change."

When all the 18k buys you is a lot of salesman 'enterprise grade' bullshit, barely tested hardware ('expensive' has a fair overlap with 'exclusive', which surprisingly often means you're going to be the one to run into the bugs) and no guarantees that will even get you an apology when the system fails, you're better off spending those 18K on 18 times the redundancy which would give you a vastly higher real availability for the same money.

If it's data I actually care about I'll go for many eyeballs, low price and high redundancy every time these days. Promises from vendors dont get your data back when they screw up.

Tapes Still Rule the Day

[Bluecobra]

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.