Various suppliers are pushing to make a new kind of optical technology the latest must-have storage, due to its durability and ever-increasing capacities.

Although most of the applicability for this technology is in the consumer space - to record music and movie DVDs and to house those space-hogging digital photos, for instance - the industry is hoping that corporate America will use the new generation of optical disks to store archival documents and things like security video and patient X-rays.

What with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and other regulations, the retention times for information are longer than ever, and more types of information have to be saved. Optical storage has been around for a very long time, and has seen devoted followings mostly in banks, insurance agencies and federal and state government.

Now the vendors have a more compelling story to sell it to newer customers, too. Optical has long had the advantages of lower cost and much higher durability than other media; temperature and humidity aren't factors here as they are with, say, tape. Now optical's catching up on the capacity side, too.

Traditionally, optical storage has used red lasers to write and read data onto CDs and DVDs. But the newer generation uses blue lasers instead. These work on shorter wavelengths than do the red ones, and so can write more data in less space and do it all more quickly than the older lasers.

So, for instance, Sony has announced its Professional Disc for Data, a 23-gbyte DVD-size disc, as opposed to the 5gigs held on a standard DVD. Sony plans to double the capacity every two years, so a 50-gig version is due by the end of next year.

A competing blue laser product by Plasmon PLC, called Ultra Density Optical, has shipped more than 2 petabytes' worth of products to over 500 customer sites around the world. The list of sites includes the usual -- investment banks, insurance companies, federal and state government organizations - but also health-care providers and entertainment concerns. Hewlett-Packard and other system vendors resell the Plasmon products.

Plasmon's existing model holds 30G-bytes, with plans for 60-gig and 120-gig versions on the drawing board. (The higher-capacity models will be able to read, but not write to, the 30-gig version.) Some 35 software vendors, including IBM Tivoli, EMC's Legato and Veritas, support UDO. Plasmon claims its tests prove that UDO has a life of over 100 years which, given increasing human longevity, is probably a good thing for health providers.

At around $2/mbyte, UDO costs more than tape and standard DVD systems, but is less expensive than traditional hard disk-based storage. Then again, UDO is not as fast as hard-drive systems. The speed difference (in the backup world, anyway) is mostly due to how hard-drives are always available and accessible, where optical media - akin to backup tapes - have to be selected and then loaded, jukebox-like, to retrieve the information.

In any event, this is not a technology meant for high transaction applications, nor is Plasmon selling it as such. "We're trading off speed for lower cost and durability," says Dave DuPont, vice president of marketing at Plasmon.

Another thing to keep in mind is the Beta vs. VHS type of industry fight going on right now, with at least two major blue-laser camps. Storage and server vendors -- and others -- are lining up behind one or the other, and it would be wise for you to figure out where to put your own loyalties before you make any major investments in media, jukeboxes and the like. Ask your key storage vendors which version they plan to support and make your decision based on that.

DROP ME A LINE

Do you see any applicability for optical media in your shop? Drop me a line at the email address below and I'll use your comments in an upcoming column.

» posted by jnaze

storage.itworld.com

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