hVault Presents Advanced Archive Program for Holographic

hVault, provider of innovative holographic digital data storage solutions, announced a program for early adopters of its holographic storage technology at the Creative Storage Conference 2012.

The hVault Advanced Archive Program is designed to provide a competitive advantage to a select number of organizations that seek to manage big data storage requirements by deploying holographic disks as part of their overall archiving strategy.

The company announced a line-up of future holographic storage products at NAB 2012 in April, and was asked by several organizations to provide early delivery of holographic hardware and media products for archival storage applications.

Video content owners and cloud storage providers alike have identified big data as a major issue. Although magnetic disk and tape storage solutions become more capable and less costly over time, the requirement to store amounts of data is growing at a faster rate. Holographic storage represents an alternative to traditional hard drive and magnetic tape storage.

In its Advanced Archive Program, hVault will rebate the difference in price for program participants whenever media prices drop during the first 5 years. Upgrades to hVault hardware will be free for five years.

An additional feature of the program provides free storage for two off-site copies of the customer’s holographic media. hVault will come to the customer’s site and make two duplicate copies of each disk in the local archive. One of the disks is stored in the secure facility at Hollywood Vaults, and the second disk is sent to Hollywood Vaults’ underground facility in Western Pennsylvania. Annual checking of the off-site archive and disaster recover disks will be provided as part of the program at no charge to the customer.

"The idea of an early adopter program originated directly from the needs of customers coping with explosive growth of their data storage requirements," commented Bland McCartha, VP of Sales and Marketing of hVault. "We knew that the storage problem was large, but we didn’t anticipate the urgency of these customers in seeking a better storage solution for the future. Our Advanced Archive Program is designed to help these customers migrate to holographic storage without the problems of being an early adopter of the new technology. Typically, early adopters of any new technology pay the highest price for the least performance. Since holographic storage will increase in performance very rapidly, we decided to make it as painless as possible for these customers to become early adopters rather than wait for higher performance and lower prices down the line."

McCartha continued: "With the anticipated life of these media to be over 50 years, the annual disc checking will provides customers with peace of mind regarding this new media type."

"I have been following the development of holographic storage for a couple of decades now. I am pleased to see that hVault is bringing cost-effective products to this market. Archivists have been struggling for years with choosing and maintaining digital media for long-term preservation. Due to its durability and stability, migration cycles for holographic disks can be much longer than magnetic media, which reduces the long term storage costs significantly," said David Wexler, experienced archivist and owner of Hollywood Vaults. "Every storage medium has its plusses and minuses. Holographic storage is for long-term archival storage while it retains the attribute of random access, which also makes it very useful for active, working archives. Working together with hVault, we have come up with a simple system of cloning the disks in the customer’s active archive and storing one copy in our secure vault facility in LA and another copy in the underground facility 2,500 miles away, 10 stories underground. This insures that the customer’s content will survive, no matter what."