More Info on Terastor. How will this impact potential KM opportunities?
Start-up TeraStor plans new storage products
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 2 (Reuter) - TeraStor Corp will announce on Monday its plans to develop, license and ship a new class of rewritable mass storage products with 20 gigabytes per surface for shipment in early 1998.
The technology, known as Near Field Recording, aims to deliver a sustainable tenfold capacity advantage at a lower cost-per-gigabyte than existing storage devices.
The fledgling start-up, founded in December 1995 by veteran storage industry executives, has raised more than $30 million, the company said in a statement made available to Reuters on Sunday ahead of the announcement.
Investors include Microsoft Corp chairman Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures Inc, Information Technology Ventures, Charter Venture Capital, Venture Law Group, Quantum Corp and TeraStor's founders.
The founders include Jim McCoy, co-founder of Quantum, Maxtor and Maxoptix, Gordon Knight, co-founder of Maxoptix and Optimem, and Maxtor's founding chief financial officer, Bill Dobbin.
Near Field Recording technology allows an dramatic increase in the bits that can be stored on a given surface area, known as the areal density, of a storage medium.
Products based on the technology are being designed to meet the needs of high-end data centers, workstations and networked environments, while at the same time being inexpensive enough for use on desktops, the company said.
TeraStor said it and licensees of its patented technologies expect them to displace tape, magneto-optical and removable hard disk and optical storage devices in a variety of back-up and archive applications.
Phil Devin, chief analyst of storage technologies at market researcher DataQuest, said Near Field Recording has been a promising new technology for years, and moving it from the laboratory to commercial use could be a dramatic change for the storage industry.
TeraStor said its engineers have combined three key patented technologies: a modification of flying read/write head normally found in conventional hard drives, an optical solid immersion lens (SIL) which enables higher recording densities, and first surface recording which enables use of lower-cost substrates.
The flying head technology includes co-exclusive patent rights granted to TeraStor by Quantum, which acquired the technology through its acquisition of Digital Equipment Corp storage business.
The fundamental SIL technology was developed and patented by Stanford University, which has licensed it exclusively to TeraStor for use in storage products. |
