Storage media to date has been dominated by magnetic or silicon-based solutions where individual bits are stored as on the surface of a recording medium. As these technologies begin approaching physical limitations, a third option is reaching the commercial markets - holographic data storage.

Commercialization of holographic optical storage has taken awhile as the chemistry of a stable storage media was developed as well as the lasers and reading and writing technology was perfected.

One of the leaders in this new storage medium is InPhase Technologies (Longmont, CO). It has a roster of strategic partners and investors that helped move the company’s technology forward, culminating in commercialization of the Tapestry 300R holographic drive. This drive, which just shipped to the first unnamed customers in December, can store 300 gigabytes (GB) of information on a single 5 ¼-inch disc, and transfer data at a rate of 20 megabytes per second (MB/s), or 160 megabits per second (Mb/s). The 20 megabytes per second was not an arbitrary goal. The company wanted to create a drive that could deliver full HD uncompressed content at the ATSC standard rate of 19.39 megabytes per second.

There are a number of potential uses for a drive like this. Besides its use in the broadcast and post-production arena, drives can be used as storage media for HD cameras, for example or as components in a RAID storage system. There are also archival storage system applications where long life and vast capacity are needed (think storage of movies or even long-term financial data).

In an announcement today, InPhase disclosed its first OEM agreement with DSM (Westerstede, Germany), a leading worldwide developer of jukebox storage systems for major enterprise customers. The agreement will enable the packaging of the Tapestry 300R drive with DSM’s jukebox technology to create the first holographic archival systems with the highest optical storage capacity on the market.

DSM will offer the systems to customers in the broadcast, government, medical, and IT markets including existing customers such as Deutsche Bank, ESA, Siemens Medical and Volkswagen, and many others where petabyte-size (250 bytes or 1K Terabytes) storage capacity is needed.

However, the Tapestry 300R also opens up new market opportunities in companies that have not yet moved beyond tape back up for critical data archive applications. In addition, the drives offer new ways of looking at partitioning RAID systems.

The Tapestry 300R drive will list for $18K while storage media, expected to be offered by Maxell, will retail for $180.

The holographic storage technology is quite interesting too. In addition to the storage media, the system consists of a spatial light modulator (an F-LCOS panel supplied by Displaytech) and red, green, or blue lasers. Red lasers offer the lowest density and may be best suited for portable holographic storage products, while blue lasers offer the highest density for more demanding applications. Company officials concede that systems can even be constructed that use red, green and blue lasers to create a volume storage medium with blue data on the top, green data in the middle and red data at the bottom. This is one of the beauties of the holographic concept - it is not limited to the discrete multi-layer approaches of HD DVD or Blu-ray.

Think this technology sounds similar to the laser-based holographic approaches being developed by Light Blue Optics and Alps Electric? You are right. So guess who is a strategic investor of InPhase - Alps Electric. The display business is fun, isn’t it?