The Shape Of Things To Come.

MARK: Good morning, Hal. I just got back from Maryland and the NASA Mass Storage Symposium.

HAL: That's the annual gathering of blue-sky academics, isn't it?

MARK: Partly, but most of them are involved in "commerciable" product research.

HAL: Are those scientists coining new words, too? Or is that lab-speak for "real-world"?

MARK: One of the issues that folks got exercised about was competition for applications between tape and disk.

HAL: The marketplace fought that battle years ago. Disk is for rapid access and tape is for cheap backup.

MARK: I thought it was a dead issue, too, but the rise of remote mirroring and copying over Internet protocol (IP) has stirred the pot up with a vengeance.

HAL: I did a two-part column about local versus remote storage, but I don't see any new tape/disk issues there. If you're stashing your data in a remote site, it's not up to you whether it gets stored on tape or disk anyway, as long as its still there when you call it back.

MARK: The decision's going to be made by the site admins who have to buy the equipment to run the site.

HAL: The advocates for remote storage services say that it's a growing market for storage hardware, but there are a lot more corporate customers and end users than remote storage providers. If most of THEM bought hardware, you'd see some upticks in manufacturers' bottom lines.

MARK: True enough, but the mindset at the conference was biased towards very high capacity storage technologies and the issues and trends around them.

HAL: High end customers like oil drillers or the U.S. Weather Service need terabytes of data, I guess. Remember when gigabytes were considered high-end capacities?

MARK: You're still old-fashioned! We're reaching a point where terabytes aren't enough any more. The conference presenters were talking about petabyte requirements.

HAL: How many bytes is that again?

MARK: Enough to consume Tokyo, like Godzilla. 500 billion sheets of paper.

HAL: What new technologies will enable petabytes of data storage?

MARK: Quite a few. IBM was suggesting the upcoming development of a disk drive head that goes beyond GMR. Holographic storage could also be commercially available within three years, if Lucent and Imation follow through.

HAL: Two companies with strong R&D departments indeed. What are they doing?

MARK: Lucent, one might say, has the easy job. They are developing the actual read/write electronics and optics. Imation has the tougher job of developing sensitive enough media to handle the recording.

HAL: People have been promising holographic storage for years and years, but it hasn't happened yet. What's the hang up now?

MARK: It's the media, of course. The underlying technology is called "change-state," which is something like "phase-change." Apparently, the pacing item is refining the chemistry to handle multilayer recording.

HAL: So it's a matter of chemistry, not physics? Ver-r-r-y interesting. Are people still talking about a holographic cube?

MARK: There's some talk, yes, but the first commercial media is likely to be a spinning disk. IBM's holo efforts are hung up with recording material issues too, but Lucent and Imation think they have a "change-state" formulation that will work. What they also need to do, though, is squeeze their drive concept into a standard 5.25-inch full height footprint.

HAL: Uh-oh. How big is it now?

MARK: The model I saw was about the size of a large desk blotter piled six inches high with books.

HAL: No rack mounts for THOSE puppies.

MARK: That's for sure. We'll know whether they can make a buildable prototype this time next year, when they move to working model.

HAL: Oh. They talked on and on about something that they haven't gotten to work yet? Some things in the storage business never change.

MARK: Do you remember covering optical tape technology?

HAL: Yes and optical tape DID work, but it died about eight years ago. It was too expensive even for seismic data and weather service applications.

MARK: It didn't die; it just went underground. Optical tape research is quite active and enjoying U.S. government funding. A commercial product could exist in 18 months. There is even an AIIM working group laboring over future standardization issues.

HAL: Well, in the optical business lately, whoever gets product to market first has the best chance of setting industry standards de facto. Look at DVD-RAM.

MARK: Let's get to that in a minute. Optical tape should be able to fulfill its promise to be a high-capacity WORM subsystem.

HAL: Ahhh, WORM!

MARK: So the question to ask is whether the industry has a place for a new WORM product that puts a terabyte in a Magstar-size tape cartridge.

HAL: That does sound like a good idea--you don't have to reinvent the mechanical components of the drive. Who's doing the hardware?

MARK: A firm called LOTS is aggressively developing heads for optical tape and several media companies are developing substrates and recording layers. A firm called Micro Continuum may market the product.

HAL: How much is an optical tape subsystem supposed to cost?

MARK: That's not certain yet. It's still a little early in the development cycle.

HAL: So for the next year or two, there will still be only three phase-change optical products: 12-inch WORM from Plasmon LMS, CD-RW from just about everybody, and DVD-RAM from Toshiba, Panasonic, and Hitachi.

MARK: Do you think the DVD battle is over and that DVD-RAM won?

HAL: Yup. The "Triple Alliance" has started a full court press at OSTA and the DVD Forum to get -ROM drive makers and DVD-Video manufacturers to read -RAM disks.

MARK: Has the copyright issue been resolved too?

HAL: Not even close and I actually have a personal stake in the outcome, at least indirectly. As you may have read in my column this month ("Ears Open Eyes", page 8), I'm producing an audio entertainment for distribution on analog cassette. I won't release a digital version--a CD or a downloadable file--until I'm satisfied that it can't be copied without sending royalties to me. So, believe it or not, I sympathize with the very people who have slowed down the development of recordable DVD! Maybe some of our readers are in the same boat or have a similar problem. If you are, email me at [e-mail].

MARK: Hal, you turncoat! We've waited long enough for the Hollywood moguls to overcome their neuroses and allow progress in storage technologies to advance. If you readers agree, email me at [e-mail].