New Name in Holographic Storage: hVault

hVault, provider of holographic digital data storage solutions, announced the launch of their company, which will develop and market a commercially archive systems based on holographic technology.

The hVault systems will be customized 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.

hVault detailed its launch at NAB 2012 in Las Vegas, from April 16-19.

hVault announced its executive sales team,
which includes:

VP of sales/marketing, Bland McCartha, who was previously the general manager of the SAMMA product line at Front Porch Digital and has held executive positions with Tektronix, Sony and Harris Corporation, and
European sales director Immo Gathmann, formerly the director of sales for German data storage library manufacturer DSM.

The core hVault team has decades of combined experience in the archival storage market, including development of the first holographic library system.

hVaults focus is a holographic disk storage system for archival applications, including both single drive autoloaders and multi-drive libraries. The systems will offer lower cost of ownership than either hard disk or data tape storage. Archival life of the hVault tamper-proof disks exceeds 50 years.

Holographic storage provides a lower TCO than other archival storage technology; has a higher media storage density than other archival solution; lower power consumption, and insensitivity to temperature, humidity, or electromagnetic fields.

According to Coughlin Associates, video distributed over the Internet consumes 60% of digital transmission capacity in North America, and 3D film production and back-catalog demand for archival video is accelerating video storage needs. The size of the video market awaiting digital archiving is currently measured in exabytes, and is exploding.

"The vastly expanding storage needs of the professional video industry have dictated migrating to a secure, long-life format, and holographic storage is the benchmark for archival video storage," said McCartha. "The characteristics of our library systems will enable companies who have already digitized their content, as well as the vast collections of analog video that still require digitization, to safely store their content and provide rapid access for monetization of that archival content. There is no other technology that comes close to the benefits of holographic storage for active archive applications."

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. Systems consume about 1/100th the power of equivalent disk storage and can operate without any special power conditioning or cooling. Media is impervious to magnetic fields, static electricity, extremes of temperature and humidity, atmospheric dust or water damage. It’s a media designed specifically for long-term archiving of digital data.

"The hVault team has put more than a decades worth of work into developing a holographic storage system for long-term, secure archival storage," said Tom Coughlin, principal of Coughlin Associates, a storage industry analyst firm. "With the incredible growth of the size and number of professional media and entertainment files needed to be preserved and protected, there is tremendous demand for new, innovative and reliable archival storage systems, such as the one from hVault."

Comments

The Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971 "for his invention and development of the holographic method". His work, done in the late 1940s, built on pioneering work in the field of X-ray microscopy by other scientists including MieczysÅ‚aw Wolfke in 1920 and WL Bragg in 1939, according to Wikipedia.

Holography is an ancestral technology. Lot of companies try to apply it to design storage media and drives. But it never happens.

Former and last holographic company InPhase Technologies, born in 2010, disappeared last year after burning $105 million in financial funding but its web site continues to be open. Deep-pocketed VCs at Signal Lake Management LLC and Acacia acquired a majority stake of InPhase in March 2010 for $10 million. Later Signal Lake bought InPhase's remains apparently now in the hands of start-up hVault, based in Boulder, CO.

hvault_1

Uncanny resemblance between InPhase (on the left)
        and hVault (on the right) drive and media
                     (Sources: InPhase on the left
                  and ComputerWorld on the right)

The capacity of the media is between 300GB and 500GB with read/write at 4.8MB/s. It was 300GB (for the first generation) to 1.6TB and 20MB/s (for the first generation) to 120MB/s for InPhase. An autoloader at approximately $50,000 will hold 15 disc cartridges. Libraries can be configured with up to 4 drives and 240 holographic disks. In a 72TB library, data will be accessible in less than 10s. Multiple library storage cabinets can expand the capacity from 240 to 2,140 disks.

We continue to believe that holography, on which engineers are working for since decades, has few chances, if any, to be the archiving media technology of the future. Tape is mainly uses for that today.

New Sony archive solution based on cartridge of existing and proven 12 Blu-ray discs with low-cost drives, seems to be a better idea.

But a real archiving media has to be established, with a REAL 100-year life guarantee, extremely high capacity and low cost per terabyte, even with slow access time and transfer rate, and furthermore standardized with multiple sources of media and drives, just to be sure not to lose part of our world's heritage and not to be obliged to verify the media regularly and to transfer all these data from one support to another one each three to five years as it's today necessary.