Venyu Blog

I found this news item in the sources I mine for this blog and although it has more immediate implications for archiving in the consumer market, it’s a company which apparently has its sights set on the business backup and recovery space.

According to this article in Computerworld, start-up Millenniata and Hitachi-LG data storage plan to soon release a new optical disc and read/write player that will store all kinds of data, including movies, photos and more—forever. So here’s what makes it interesting, even provocative: The M-Disc, which the company claims can be dipped in liquid nitrogen and then boiling water without harming it, is made from what the company has christened a “natural” substance that is “stone-like.”

The article goes on to explain that Like DVDs and Blu-ray discs, the M-Disc platters are made up of multiple layers of material. But unlike the former, there is no reflective or die layer. Instead, during the recording process a laser “etches” pits onto the substrate material.

In the article Millenniata CEO Scott Shumway said, “Once the mark is made, it’s permanent. It can be read on any machine that can read a DVD. And it’s backward compatible, so it doesn’t require a special machine to read it – just a special machine to write it.”

For now the M-Discs have their limits, storing the same amount of data as a DVD: 4.7GB, with the caveat that the discs write at only 4x or 5.2MB/sec, half the speed of today’s DVD players, a process the company’s engineers are working to get to at least 8x.

The company also has at least one non-consumer customer convinced: The Defense Department’s Naval Air Warfare Weapon’s Division. In 2009 Millenniata’s M-Disc was tested against five other optical disc vendors and was, ultimately, the only media type that suffered no data degradation at all following that testing.

While the DVD industry claims DVDs should last from 50 to 100 years, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), DVDs can break down in “several years” in normal environments. Additionally, NIST suggests DVDs should be stored in spaces where relative humidity is between 20% and 50%, and where temperatures do not drop below 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

Gene Ruth, a research director at Gartner, said generally he’s not heard of a problem with DVD longevity. Ruth also said he can see a market in long-term archiving for a product such as the M-Disc because some industries, such as aircraft engineering, healthcare and financial services, store data for a lifetime and beyond.

Speaking of lifetimes I can see some value in having Grandfather Fred and Grandma Ethel record their life stories for their great great grandkids to watch and to give their descendants a sense of where their family’s story began (at least at that point in time), complete with highlights from that two-week vacation they took in the Catskills, but business archiving? Apart from national defense agency employees and the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I’m not totally convinced.

Can’t you see it now? It’s a hundred, maybe two hundred or more years in the future and the equivalent of one of today’s IT administrators has come across a cache of these M-Discs. The administrator is excited at the discovery of these spherical time capsules and shares it with his colleagues, with management and maybe even the media where, in fact, the story goes viral. Management and media alike can’t wait to see what’s on the discs, to find that singular revelation that has leapfrogged time that one of their peers in the distant past thought was just important enough to be brought to someone’s attention in the future. The excitement begins to build, the “hype” machine goes into over-drive and the level of anticipation is off the charts.

The only problem, of course, is finding a player that will extract it from a media where the data is hopelessly etched in stone. (Can anyone say Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone’s Vault on National TV?) Oh to be a fly on the wall on the day that happens…

Of course, had there been no “player” to locate and depend on but merely SaaS backed up into the cloud and onto the Internet –which, all indications suggests will still be around a hundred or more years from now, the result might be dramatically different.

Anyway, Shumway said the products will begin shipping next month and should be in stores in the beginning of October.

Just in time, I suppose, for “Black Friday” and the upcoming Xmas shopping season.