hVault, a supplier of holographic digital data storage solutions, is setting up a company to develop and market what it claims to be the first commercially available archive systems based on holographic technology.

Holographic storage is much more cost effective than magnetic storage, either disk-based or tape-based. Holographic media has an archival lifetime in excess of 50 years, which eliminates the 2-5 year cycle of replacing magnetic media. Holographic storage systems consume about 1/100th the power of equivalent disk storage and can operate without any special power conditioning or cooling. The system is totally impervious to magnetic fields, static electricity, extremes of temperature and humidity, atmospheric dust or water damage.

hVault website is surprisingly economical when it comes to describing the nitty-gritty of the technology the company is using given commercial products are shortly announced. hVault reportedly purchased the assets of pioneer holographic developer InPhase Technologies that showed a disk-based prototype at NAB 2005.

The hVault says its systems will be customised for professional video customers, as well as enterprise firms with high-resolution imaging and large data storage needs, including medical, government/military, and industrial applications.
Sony Moves Industry toward the Creation of New Mass-Storage Optical Disc Archive Solutions

A company squarely relying on disc for high-capacity archiving is Sony who announced that it will be commercializing a next-generation optical disc archive storage system. The Japanese maker will also organise an Optical Disc Archive Advisory Group to promote the adoption of this new storage format among the various companies in related industries.

By Fall 2012, Sony will be releasing various optical disc media for archive storage solutions into the market that is compatible with the ?ODS-D55U? drive unit equipped with a USB 3.0 interface and storage capacities between 300GB-1.5TB (model name: ODC1500R etc.) Sony plans to consecutively enhance its product lineup upon this initial release.

According to Coughlin Associates, video distributed over the Internet consumes 60% of digital transmission capacity in North America, and 3D film production and back-catalogue demand for archival video is accelerating video storage needs.

It their 2011 Digital Storage for Media and Entertainment Report, the analysts forecast that between 2011 and 2016 the media and entertainment industry will see about a 7.7x increase in the required digital storage capacity and about a 5.6x growth in storage capacity shipments per year (from 11,248 PetaBytes to 62,736 PB.)

About 57% of the total storage capacity will be used for content archiving and preservation in 2011. Coughlin Associates believe that this will increase to 60% of total capacity by 2016 due to more efficient and cost effective conversion services, lower overall storage costs and a greater ROI on long tail content.

In 2011, they estimate that about 43.6% of the total storage media shipped for all the digital entertainment content segments was tape with about 39.1% HDD, 17.1% optical and 0.2% flash memory (mostly in digital cameras and some media distribution servers).

Story filed 17.04.12