Loading ...Star Trek storage
I was never a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation — I watched the only Trek that mattered, the one with James T. Kirk, dammit — but I did find the concept of the Holodeck, a 3-D interactive simulation chamber, fascinating. Holograms themselves are fascinating — three-dimensional but insubstantial, only as heavy as light. Holography was invented by Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian scientist Dennis Gabor — no relation to Zsa Zsa, I trust — in 1947, but mass-production of cheap lasers has given the technology a push. In IT, its application to storage has been under development for several years.
DCE Aprilis, recently acquired by Dow Corning, is the highest profile develoer of the technology. Data is represented by one laser beam. A second reference beam interferes with the first, creating a 3-D “page” of data. Not only does this allow much greater storage density — data is stored through the depth of the media, not jusy on its surface, so a DVD-format disk would hold about 1 TB of data — searched are lightning fast. The search string is turned into a laser beam which scans the media, reproducing the reference beam — the stronger the reference beam, the closer the match to the data stream.
We’re hoping to go into more detail with the scientists at Aprilis in a future podcast. Stay tuned …
Posted on August 3rd, 2007 by Dave Webb and filed under Research, Storage |