As regular readers of this blog know, we’re obsessed with out there tech. Anything that smacks of Star Trekkian futurism gets our blood pumping. This week, Deep Storage’s Howard Marks reports on something we’ve been watching for some time: holographic storage.
The news is sad. The company that was developing it, InPhase, is out of business. Their web site is still up, but according to the article, the company, a Bell Labs spin-off, was shuttered in early February and the Colorado Dept. of Revenue is now seizing its assets. As he points out, for now, technologies like deduplication make it hard to justify spending $10K on holographic drive.
Despite this terrible setback I for one don’t want to believe this idea will die out entirely. It promises a new generation in storage at a time when data growth is spiraling out of control, threatening to overtake data centers worldwide. And who says we can’t add compression and deduplication on top of that? Howard and I both predict that sooner or later someone else will follow the holographic storage clarion call. As he so succinctly put it: “It’s just so cool.”
Image from: Geek Stuff
