Alliance Storage Technologies Plans for New Optical Products in 2012

Alliance Storage Technologies, Inc. confirmed plans to debut a new product line in 2012, with beta testing, trials and demos planned for Q4 2011. This announcement came during an industry trade show in London and solidifies an international presence and intent of the company to continue pursuit of the professional archiving market.

"Our product development teams are engaged and making significant strides in the development of our next generation product offerings", stated ASTI CEO, Chris Carr. "Our new products will remain rooted in our tradition of scalable, secured data storage archive solutions, providing increased media density as well as providing significant increases in overall library capacities – translating to a lower overall total cost of ownership."

Exercising prudence, ASTI declined to supply specifics about the upcoming product line, but did note that the roadmap will increase library capacity up to 800%.

This statement of intent is one in a series of actions undertaken by the ASTI to demonstrate its commitment to the global archiving marketplace. The company recently hired a Director of EMEA and Asia Pacific Sales (Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia/Oceania) in order to support the growing opportunity in those countries. ASTI offers full technical and service support to those regions as well via Authorized Service Providers.

In 2010, ASTI experienced a measurable increase in profits and securely repositioned the company as a manufacturer of Optical Archive Solutions, as well as a worldwide supplier of parts and service. ASTI has already made significant technological improvements to the Plasmon product line, including upgrades to the AA Software, self-diagnostic functions and improved search and storage management features.

Comments

The highest-capacity of UDO librairies from ASTI is currently reached with the G638 with 638 slots corresponding to 38.3TB. An increase of 800% means 5,742 slots or 344.7TB. It's much better but you find now tape libraries, in competition for the same archiving market, at several petabytes.

But we want to know if UDO optical disc technology will evolve in term of disc capacity and corresponding drives. Users need definitely a clear roadmap to be sure about the future of UDO, 5.25-inch UDO-2 being currently and since a long time at 60GB double-sided.

ASTI only writes that "the roadmap extends to 240GB". But with which type of media and when?

The company got from Plasmon library and spare parts activity but not the R&D for discs and drives.

Two companies we know are able to help ASTI in this field. The first one is is start-up General Storage and Technology AS, with core team coming from former Tandberg Storage ASA including CTO Erik Solhjell. This Norwegian firm is working on a 12cm archival (100 years and more) WORM disc using micro-patterns to store data on many layers to reach 6TB and with future generations at 50TB and beyond.

The second one is Plarion, founded in 2009 by former employees of Plasmon, with an industrial heritage in optical media design, including the world’s first commercially available blue laser media.

It's a huge challenge, not only technically. Removable media need also absolutely to have multiple sources of disc and drive manufacturers, to be standardized, as well as being supported by several big companies.

At least two other U.S. start-ups are involved in long-term archiving optical media: Millenniata and Opternity Storage.

There is today a real need for an affordable long-term archiving media. Tapes are not. Access time is much too slow and you need to read them each three to five years, that's the recommendation of the manufacturers themselves. Blu-rays are not. Capacity is not sufficient and long-term reliability is not guaranteed. Microfilm's revival? We doubt.

Unfortunately, the only valuable solution today is to store on high-capacity 3.5-inch SATA HDDs in huge JBODs, RAIDs or disk libraries and to transfer their data on new magnetic disk drives also each three to five years.