Interviews

posted on 16 May 2008 05:30

Plasmon, the leading supplier of mainstream optical archiving products, is not put out by InPhase's launch of its 300GB holographic disk and drive. Nor is it perturbed by the now unfettered Blu-ray juke box archivers, with HD-DVD removed from the scene.

The attraction of optical disk archiving is that it is a long-lasting and natural WORM (write-once-read-many) technology offering random access as well as offline storage, making it faster to access than tape and a more certain recording medium.

Plasmon, a British firm, developed its UDO format as a follow-on to MO (magneto-optical) and has built it into an Archiving Appliance product, a complete, ready to run system. UDO is currently at generation 2 level, offering 60GB capacity and 12MB/sec I/O.

The product is moving beyond its initial niche of medical images and document records as enterprises face the need to archive more data for reasons of regulatory compliance and the need to save space on hard disk drive arrays. There is now a lot of focus on Plasmon's Active Archive (AA) product and EAA (Enterprise Active Archive - Plasmon's archive technology integrated with Nexsan's Assureon drive array).

Two events have a potential impact on Plasmon: the launch of InPhase's 300GB Tapestry holographic disk offering similar longevity and WORM characteristics, at first glance; and the unfettrering of Blu-ray as the competing HD-DVD high-definition optical disk format has been retired by Toshiba.

Will cheaper Blu-ray and more capacious Tapestry squeeze UDO from two sides?

Plasmon and InPhase

Mike Koclanes is Plasmon's chief strategy officer and SVP for sales and marketing. B&F asked him about InPhase's announcement of Tapestry availability.

"We meet with (InPhase president and CEO) Nelson (Diaz) and the InPhase people periodically; both of us being involved in promoting optical storage. There are clearly some niche (archiving) industry segments demanding extremely large files and fast ingestion. ... seismic data, motion pictures with special effects (for example)."

He thinks the drive is pretty expensive, but then it is a first generation device intended for a niche and high-end market.

"For us we archive relatively smaller files - 50KB mortgage files for example. We're offering a total solution with cacheing and HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) software. InPhase is pretty much offering a drive and someone else is offering a library"

Is InPhase not the right technology for mainstream archiving? "That's right. But there definitely are verticals where it makes sense."

Also, "Even in a single company you might have different archive needs," such as mainstream archiving for insurance and other financial records as well as a very high-capacity archiving requirement for large media files.

Mainstream archiving requires fully-rounded products and Plasmon has produced, in the Archive Appliance, a system which, Koclanes believes, is exactly that, saying: "We virtualize management of UDO and the archive behind the archive software. We're just trying to set service levels for archiving."

One of the capabilities Plasmon has added is the ability to effectively destroy data on its WORM media by encrypting it and requiring a key to access it. If the key is deleted then the files it is used to open can no longer be decrypted and they are effectively deleted. This makes Plasmon's archive suitable for use in regulatory frameworks where archived files have to be deleted after a retention period closes.

Koclanes asks rhetorically: "With InPhase how do you destroy the archve?" There is no included encryption technology.

Plasmon and Blu-ray

Blu-ray media, like a CD or DVD, is handled as bare media in a juke box. Both UDO and Tapestry media are stored in cartridges. Regarding this Koclanes said: "I'm not optimistic about Blu-ray. InPhase (and us) took an approach that's robust with cartridge technology. Using low-cost stacks of cheap media - bare media handled by robotics - can mean media damage."

Blu-ray is designed for streaming video and not random access; there is no verification after write and it's not really practucal for mainstream business or professional archiving. A Blu-ray jukebox is fundamentally a CD or DVD changer and Koclanes said: "It's basically the reason why I insisted we got out of the DVD changer business."

He categorises Blu-ray juke boxes as very low cost and low reliability archival products, saying: "Bargain hunters will go out and get a WORM archive with it. I've only seen it twice in the deals we're involved in and it was brought in for pricing pressure. One fingerprint on Blu-ray media and the error correction goes crazy, the transfer rate drops to 1MB/sec." It's just not industrial-strength media, not enterprise-class technology.

Plasmon and Centera

Koclanes characterises Plasmon as an alternative to EMC's Centera and HP's RISS products, saying: "We're very cost-effective compared to them."

Recent wins include a major and well-known US health-care provider where an entire set of Centeras has been displaced, more than fifty of them. A very large and substantial law firm based in the Netherlands has also bought Plasmon archive products which have displaced a Centera. Plasmon is also doing well in Orange County, Florida, in the public sector.

Summing up

Neither InPhase nor Blu-ray products appear capable of displacing Plasmon's archive products, it having the mainstream business optical archive market pretty much to itself and replacing tape and disk-based alternatives as its message gets heard more and more.

Summing up Plasmon's general business situation Koclanes said this: "We've done a very good job of moving the product on. All the growth is in the AA and EAA. But we're still shredding the legacy. We are very optimistic about the potential of our technology."

^{[Chris Mellor.]}