After 9 years and $100,000,000, holographic storage pioneer InPhase Technologies has shut down without ever shipping a product. Their office building was also seized for non-payment of back taxes.
They assured me that the product would ship in May, 2008. It didn’t. Reportedly many employees took pay cuts – or no pay at all – to help keep the company going.
It is a sad and ignominious end to a brave technology experiment. And a warning to anyone trying to replace disk drives as random access storage.
The 40% problem
At a 40% annual capacity growth rate hard drives are difficult to catch. When InPhase started showing their initial prototype, 300 GB wasn’t much less than hard drives. But 3 years later 300 GB is less than 1/6th the capacity.
Nor was it very speedy: 20 MB/sec. You can do almost as well with a USB thumb drive.
InPhase planned to take the drives to 1.6 TB and 120 MB/sec. If they could ship that today, they’d have a competitive product.
In the meantime, cheap hard drives and cheaper hard drive docks make it easy to use bare drives for backup and data transfer. The market for 300 GB removable drives withered before it had a chance to grow.
As I wrote 4 years ago:
I love holographic technology and wish InPhase the best, but I don’t believe they have a viable business with their technology – yet. The problem: 3.5″ disk drives will reach 750GB by the end of this year with much faster transfer rates. InPhase’s 20 Mbps is only 2.5 million bytes per second or only 9GB per hour. It will take over 30 hours just to fill one disk! I predict that hard drives will still be more convenient and fairly cost-competitive than this promising new technology.
But keep at it guys. Lightning will strike if your investors are patient enough.
They weren’t.
The StorageMojo take
The disk industry spends over $1B a year improving hard drives. Thousands of PhD scientists and engineers are busy researching drive problems.
That kind of momentum is hard for a startup to overcome. NAND flash did so only because it built a large business in mobile applications where disk drives couldn’t compete.
For a startup to succeed with optical storage they’ll need to:
- a) build a multi-billion dollar business where disks and now flash don’t compete, such as Blu-ray’s movie distribution, or
- b) start with a product that is 10x – 5 years – ahead of current disk drive capacity, and
- c) have a clear grasp of what continued 40% annual growth means for disk drive capacity pricing – and product delays.
There are several firms pushing optical storage forward. Blu-ray is the least ambitious – now that HD DVD is (almost) gone – and that huge investment is almost certain to have a negative ROI, even if 3D content succeeds in making it the preferred consumer physical medium.
Nor is the outlook for other optical drives promising. Like removable magnetic drives before them, they are being crushed by substitute technologies like USB flash drives, 2.5″ drives & drive docks and downloading and wireless networks.
With the InPhase demise we may never see holographic storage commercialized. Especially if disk vendors start building archive-quality disks.
Comments welcome, of course. I was rooting for InPhase’s success, to no avail. Another version of this post was published on my ZDnet blog.
Sad news. I was too rooting for InPhase even though I did not have your insight on the product nor did I meet any of the employees. The thought though of going towards holographic technology – getting a bit closer to a Star Trek era was really refreshing!
Still as you pointed out, InPhase’s product became really obsolete due to the advance of the current hard drive. I truly hope that someone will learn from this “experiment” (because unfortunately this is what it ended up being despite the good intentions) and reuse/move the technology forward.
Thank you for sharing.
Sad to hear the news. “holographic cube” storage was always a curiousity of my mind.
Your parting comment does interest me (due to limitations with current magnetic media)… “archive-quality disks”. Any information I could read on the topic? Thanks – Jim
I could never make myself “root” for InPhase. Do you get all excited for your home team when you KNOW they are going to lose? No.
It was pretty clear to me from the beginning that given even an optimistic reading of InPhase’s roadmaps–and an optimistic reading of a roadmaps is, of course, always highly charitable–that while the technology was interesting for technology’s sake, there was no really good use case for it.
“Archive quality” disks would be an interesting subject. Not sure what it means, yes, someone please say more. 🙂 I may feel impelled to go get NDA roadmaps briefings from the relevant manufacturer. 🙂
C//
Aye, another one bites the dust. Like you Robin I was not too surprised by InPhase’s demise, storage is a deceptively simple market. Way too many times I’ve phrases like “Oh I could slap together a few Linux boxes and TB drives and get three times the storage for 1/10th the cost!” Only to find that same person later humbled by the difference between “a bunch of disk drives attached to a computer” and “a storage system.”
Archival storage is a huge problem, and one that is only getting exponentially bigger as time goes by and data retention requirements go up. But like you can’t fight the next war with the last war’s tactics, I doubt we’ll solve the 21st century’s storage problem with 20th century ideas. $0.01 per Terabyte, 25 year retention, 100 GB/sec transfer rate, zero static power loss, and time to recover on the order of minutes rather than days. I don’t think such a system exists yet but I know that if you think you’re designing an archival storage solution you should measure your fitness against that particular razor.
–Chuck
Jim, Joe,
“Archive quality disk” – I didn’t invent the idea, but maybe the term. A disk you can put on a shelf for 10-20 years and still read. Requires different lubricants, probably 5400 RPM or less, extra-robust ECC, maybe HAMR, native USB interface or a little dock. ProStor + shelf life.
Data longevity trumps performance and IOPS. I’m told Seagate built a disk for car navigation systems guaranteed for 10 years.
Sell ’em to consumers and SOHO/SMB by the millions – anyone who can’t see laying a few grand for LTO. I’m sure there’s someone in one of the company labs itching to try this. People are buying those USB docks for a reason. With USB 3 they will have good bandwidth and a long interface life.
Robin
“I knew it two years ago!” – see here:
http://storagemojo.com/2008/04/20/holographic-storage-debuts-next-month/#comment-194166
quite a long time to die…
Inphase is like a white elephant that’s just limping along without having any impact. Limping corpse so to say. They do have a single customer in Time Warner…which really started as a Beta customer. But till date that’s their only single customer that I’m aware of. Holographic storage in my opinion is akin to vaporware……it’s just not a seller! When there’s tape, blu ray optical, disk…….then holographic? Again it’s simply not a seller. Somehow it befuddles me how people get convinced to plunk their money into products that will never leave the lab. Holographic storage? Not even GE with all it’s might will give it a tangible time of day. If I had a few million to invest I’d rather buy a ranch in Wyoming than plunk it into InPhase………
“Archive quality disk 
Thanks for the update.
Regards,
Jim
Looking forward, the only constant around digital archive is the idea of change – no one knows what physical medium will be in vogue 20 years from now, and no one knows how long the current medium holding the data will do so reliably. The solution is to create a portable approach to storing/archiving data, one that would easily allow migration to future, more efficient storage platforms.
Rather than using an ‘archive quality’ disk (as defined above), one alternative is taking industry-standard disk & leveraging MAID techniques to achieve a similar end-point.
Nexsan is one vendor that has enhanced MAID (AutoMAID) that’s interesting in practice (sales disclaimer – don’t work for Nexsan, but as an IBM specialist, we also do use Nexsan on occasion). We can use bulk MAID disk within our infrastructural approach to building enterprise-wide archives.
In projects requiring a persistent, ‘active’ archive, we’ve found that a storage grid topology (using IBM’s GPFS & TSM), creates a scaled-out tiered storage approach, offering the option of abstracting tape (via TSM’s HSM) as an underlying storage tier (essentially using the guts of SoNAS in a custom, purpose-built approach).
Rather than the clustered NAS approach (file system closed within the walls of the array), exposing the GPFS filesystem allows us to loosely couple applications (transcode, encryption, etc.) to the compute (hpc) side of the grid, while offering scale-out performance/capacity, and thanks to TSM, built in data protection for backup & DR. …ie, no NDMP-based backups (which don’t work well in PB-sized environments).
Apologies for the sales pitch, wanted rather to communicate an infrastructural approach to solving real-world problems.
Best –
John Aiken