Catching up on this week's reading and found this in LAN Times. Not presenting it as news, since it was discussed here last week, just as further info. Even if Ampex is saying that no news is not necessarily bad news, especially regarding KM, their marketing of existing storage solutions has been extremely low key.
DISK-DRIVE INNOVATION
Startup Raises Bar on Storage Capacity
Claims disk technology will record more databut at a cheaper cost
By Brett Mendel
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A San Jose, Calif., startup is touting a new disk technology that it claims will dramatically improve storage capacities--at a cheaper cost than any existing media.
TeraStor Corp. this month unveiled the details of its invention--dubbed Near Field Recording--which draws from a combination of technologies including existing hard disk and magneto optical drives.
According to Amyl Ahola, executive vice president and chief operating officer at TeraStor, the drives will let data be recorded at 10 times the "areal" density of a hard disk: 10GB per square inch vs. 1GB per square inch. At the same time, the company claims, its drives will roughly maintain the 10-millisecond access speed of today's hard disks.
Drives using Near Field Recording--due from the company early next year and from OEMs soon after--will incorporate the flying-head mechanism found in traditional hard drives for writing data.
Instead of being written directly to the medium, however, data is sent by laser through a special lens developed at Stanford University and licensed by TeraStor. Data emerging from this so-called solid immersion lens is then recorded with a technique known as first-surface recording. Developed by Digital Equipment Corp. and now owned by and licensed from Quantum Corp., the method calls for data to be recorded on layers at the surface of the disk, which is similar to a hard disk; however, the plastic media being written to resembles a compact disc.
Despite the newness of the technology, TeraStor also claims that the cost per megabyte for its drives and media will come in significantly under those of hard disk, optical, and even tape. Although he declined to give specific pricing, Ahola said the drives and media themselves--while capable of holding more data--will be priced comparable to or less than tape products.
"We do nothing but expand disk and storage capacity, so we're always looking for good storage at a reasonable price," said Brian Kelly, senior network technician at The M/A/R/C Group Inc., a supplier of marketing data in Irving, Texas.
The company currently backs up 500GB of server data to three Digital Linear Tape libraries and is adding about 60GB per month, estimated Kelly, who is interested in the TeraStor technology.
TeraStor said it will be the first to market with its drives; OEMs of external drives are expected to follow. According to the company, server OEMs are looking into using TeraStor drives instead of existing hard drives in their machines.
The success of Near Field Recording, however, may have less to do with sheer storage requirements than another important factor, according to one expert.
"It's all about I/O rate--that's the real metric," said Michael Peterson, president of Strategic Research Corp., an industry research and consulting company in Santa Barbara, Calif.
With the trend toward externalized, shared storage on corporate networks, data-transfer rates and access speeds become more critical than ever, he said. "In this model, disk is king."
For more information, contact TeraStor at (408) 324-2110; terastor.com |
