Today's enterprise has a ravenous appetite for information, and mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley require longer retention for even more kinds of data. Standard storage devices are reaching their limits. Enter something entirely new in the storage arena: holographic storage. This new technology promises to store previously unheard-of amounts of data efficiently, and to enable speedy access.

Sound too good to be true?

Enterpriseleadership.org recently spoke with Kevin Curtis, chief technology officer of InPhase Technologies, a developer of holographic storage, about how it works, how (and why) it was developed, and what it can bring to the enterprise. For both businesses and consumers who need to keep their digital-data houses in good order, holographic storage might just be "the next cool thing."

EL: Can you tell us about yourself, and about your company, InPhase  Technologies?

KC: I've got a bachelor's, master's, and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in electrical engineering. I've worked about 17 years in holography and optics at Caltech Northrop and Bell Labs. At Bell Labs I was the project manager for the holographic storage project at Murray Hill; from this group, InPhase was formed in 2000.

EL: So, InPhase Technologies was actually a spin-off of Bell Labs,  with the aim of developing holographic storage technology?

KC: Yes. We were very focused, and put together a great team at Bell Labs and at InPhase to work on all the technical, and the business and marketing issues.

EL: What is holographic storage, and what are  the benefits it will bring to the enterprise?

KC: Holographic storage is similar to an optical disk, like a DVD or a CD, but it's actually designed to go into automation systems. Instead of holding 4.7 gigabytes like a DVD, the first-generation holographic storage disk will hold 300 gigabytes and will transfer it at the rate of 20 megabytes per second. And, that's the first generation: we've actually designed three generations of product going out to 1.6 terabytes on the same disk and it can be read at 120 megabytes per second. The disks are all plastic, there is no metal there, and they've been tested for 50 years archival lifetime. They're very stable, and they can be manufactured inexpensively. So, the primary market for this technology is corporate long-term archival storage, for those who have digital assets that they want to keep for a long time.

EL: Could this technology replace the tapes that are being used for  data storage now?

KC: Yes; tape systems are really designed for, and the market for them was, backup. Data backed up in this manner is not meant to be kept for very long. Archival storage means storage for seven, or 10, or 50 years. But in the case of the professional video marketplace, for example, or compliance, or medical marketplaces, you're required to keep digital data for very long periods of time. Holographic storage offers a very unique combination of the robustness and random access of an optical disk with capacity that's more akin to tape.

EL: What was the genesis of this technology?

KC: The concepts behind this technology go back at least to the mid 1960s, and there was a lot of work in this area, including at Bell Labs, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But there were some fundamental issues that couldn't be addressed then in terms of components and media. In 1994, Bell Labs decided that you could actually buy enough of the drive components to be able to put together a system, and then try to figure out what was needed for media. We've now made tremendous advances in media by developing a unique, two chemistry photopolymer material. We came up with a way of manufacturing the media at a low cost, to multiplex and record holograms at high density, and to enable recovery in a very robust manner. That's the genesis of the basic technology.

EL: Using holographic storage technology, how easy is it to not only gather, but retrieve large quantities of information, quickly?

KC: That is one of the advantages of a disk versus a tape: a disk has random access. For completely random access, this disk functions at a speed that's similar to your CD or DVD, around 250 milliseconds. But the technology offers a unique characteristic: inside a rather large body of data -- say about 150 megabytes -- you can have two-millisecond access to data inside a particular field. It's a unique combination. And, you certainly do have random access, and once you get that, you can stream it out continuously at 20 megabytes per second initially, and this speed will be increasing to up to 120 megabytes per second with future generations. The one thing that's unusual, at least for disk, is that those are sustained rates. Often, with CDs and DVDs, and other disks, they spec just the outer track, which spins faster than the inner tracks. And so the actual rate that you see on a CD or DVD is much slower than the actual spec. Our rates of speed are actually continuous, sustained across the entire disk.

EL: Can you talk about data security and holographic storage?  Are security issues similar to those for other storage technologies? 

KC: Yes, especially for removal of media. This has garnered a lot of attention lately: As the capacity of these media goes up -- whether it's a tape or a disk -- somebody could, potentially, walk out the door with a lot of data. Every company that's in the data storage field is considering encryption. And the format that we've implemented for our device certainly supports and anticipates encryption use.

In addition, the first generation technology, particularly for archive, is worm technology, meaning, write once, read many times. It actually cannot be erased. That's often very important, legally, for record authentication.

Compliance and Holographic Storage

EL: Gathering and storing certain data is also required for regulatory compliance. You touched on that when you talked about medical compliance.

KC: Yes. Five years ago, archival storage was the ugly stepchild of storage. Now, it's coming front and center as a critical and very rapidly growing issue. That's a real problem, because tapes and other technologies weren't designed for long-term retention. That's where we see a good opportunity for holographic storage to make a difference. Both e-mail and e-mail attachments now have to be kept for a very, very long period of time. Both the medical, and the financial industries, for example, have significant data archival requirements. And, Sarbanes-Oxley is a very significant factor.

Our technology's also getting a lot of attention in the professional video space. More and more content is being filmed in high-definition digital format, which increases the difficulty of storing it.

EL: InPhase is currently focusing this technology as it is relevant for the corporate customer. But do you foresee moving more into the consumer market?

KC: Absolutely. We actually have two projects to develop holographic consumer products that are being funded by major companies. One product is a holographic, read-only memory, like a CD-ROM or a DVD-ROM. Essentially, it's a very small card that could hold maybe 50 gigabytes that can be replicated very quickly. In optical media, the real advantage of optical storage has been in the ability to quickly replicate the content so that the cost of distribution is very, very low. We've developed a mastering and replication process for holographic that allows us to do the same thing: we can replicate content and distribute it. This could be for games or any sort of video or video content. You can have a very small drive with huge capacity that can be distributed very, very inexpensively.

The other project that's being funded by a major company is translating professional recording technology into technology available to consumers -- like the next generation after Blu-ray or HD-DVD -- something we can make very small and inexpensive.

EL: What about the cost of your technology?

KC: For professional products, we have to do a tremendous amount of testing, and the reliability is really critical. So certainly, that adds cost -- and, this is the first generation. Initially, we're looking at drive prices of $18,000 and media prices for 300 gigabytes of about $180. These compare quite favorably with tape prices, particularly high-end tape prices. Video professionals are used to that. Now, for a small business, that's quite an expensive piece of equipment, but we feel that this is an initial launch price. With volume, our pricing can come down into the small business price range.

EL: Enterpiseleadership.org did an interview some months ago with the chief technology officer from another corporation. We called the interview "The Next Cool Thing," because this CTO talked about certain emergent technologies that he felt would lead to big paradigm shifts. In that spirit, could holographic storage technology be called "the next cool thing"?

KC: There are two points to be made here, at least. One is that archiving for both the consumer and professional is now becoming a really significant need. Our technology has some unique attributes that can satisfy this critical need -- that's quite important for business. Also, this is a new approach: storage does not require a spinning disk. There are new consumer formats, particularly for distribution, that can be enabled because of this technology. Very small devices -- 50 gigabytes on something the size of a postage stamp -- can be replicated very, very cheaply. I think that really could enable some very cool consumer applications.