Holographic Solution
Oct 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
As the broadcast industry's conversion to HD continues, the deployment of new, portable media storage solutions is also moving ahead — specifically, the holographic data storage initiative pursued by partners Maxell and InPhase Technologies. Since late last year, a few major broadcasters have been testing Maxell's holographic data storage discs in combination with InPhase's Tapestry HDS-300R data drives. At press time, both companies expected to be shipping those products to their OEMs before the end of the year as the next step in a push to make holographic technology the preferred HD broadcast storage solution.
Maxell officials say the first-generation version of the company's data discs will hold 300GB of data, while the second generation (debuting in 2008) is expected to hold 800GB, and the third generation (2010) will hold 1.6TB.
Essentially, recording to holographic discs simply means recording into the entire media disc and not simply onto its surface as technologies like DVD or Blu-ray do.
“We record volumetrically into the depth of the media,” explains Rich D'Ambrise, Maxell's director of technology. “The media does not spin during recording and reading cycles; rather, it turns like the hand on a watch, very slowly, only when it needs to go to a different sector of the media to write or read a new page.”
Last November, Turner Broadcasting played a national PSA live to air from a first-generation Maxell storage disc using a prototype of the Tapestry drive. Company engineers were so pleased with the test that they are currently preparing to weave holographic technology into their HD infrastructure as a primary archival solution.
“We are migrating toward all-digital file storage, and once ingested, we want to be able to re-air material from our central server whenever we want to,” says Ron Tarasoff, vice president of broadcast technology and engineering at Turner Broadcasting. “The problem was, as we move more into the high-definition world, the size of some of these files is suddenly huge — sometimes six times the data. One of our objectives was to find some kind of media with a huge capacity for storage, but without taking forever to write that data onto the media and then read it back when we need it. After testing it, I'm confident we will migrate to holographic discs in coming months.”
Obviously, such technology has many potential applications, but major broadcasters are the first industry sector to dive into holographic storage as a practical solution. Pappas Broadcasting has also been testing the system and, at press time, was slated to receive some Tapestry drives at the end of the year to launch a major archival program.
“We are old-fashioned broadcasters with almost 30 stations, and in our Reno, Nev., facility, where I am based, we are planning to launch [this fall, at press time] a one-hour live local newscast in HD — the first all-HD regional facility in this area,” says James Ocon, deputy director of engineering at Pappas Broadcasting. “Our physical facility is an 8,500-square-foot facility built behind 100ft. of glass inside a local shopping mall. With workspace at a premium, we had to look to centralizing our assets and discouraging duplication of the workload. I had been watching InPhase's technology for a couple of years, and I felt we should definitely use it, especially when you consider that, within the next couple of years, it will go up to a 1.2TB level of storage on a CD-ROM-sized device. We can store copious amounts of video assets in an offline configuration that way, as well as near-line storage. It's a perfect way to transfer assets.”
