Holographic storage

You know, as any IT pro can tell you, you can never be too rich, too thin or have too much network storage. That's particularly true now as we're storing music files and large video files. We need to find space for them and we need to be able to retrieve them and play them back as quickly as we can. So how are we going to find the storage space for all these large files going forward? Well, one of the challenges we have is that we're maxing out on our existing technology. So we're going to have to move from hard drives as we understand them to more of a holographic storage model and that's what I want to talk about now, and I want to do it by kind of contrasting these two methods of storage.

You know, what we've been doing over the last 15 years is writing data basically in two dimensions on a platter, this two dimensions, you think of a circle and you say where does it go on this circle. It is writing to a disk and as I said this is a mature technology. We've made the disk faster. We've made them smaller. We've increased our ability to write data to those disks. But we can see the end of the timeline on this technology and our ability to innovate. So how does holographic storage work? Well, the big change is that it's three-dimensional, so you're not only looking at things, say in your x and y, coordinates, but you're looking at them in the z coordinates too, up and down. So you're able to write in a volume rather than just write on a flat surface. Again, since the name is holographic as you'd expect it involves holograms and since it's a new technology, we're just at the beginning of what we can get from it.

So how do we actually create a hologram? Well, unfortunately you need a real artist to be able to give you a good representation. You're going to have to bear with my feeble attempts. But look at this, these are shutters, and imagine instead of just 20 or 25 that there were 100s or even 1000s of tiny shutters in a grid and that it was possible to open and close individual shutters as you need it and then imagine if you had two lasers, one coming up here and a different type of laser that would be coming up from this side and what happens is, as the first laser goes though the shutters, sends light through the shutters, and then it interacts with the light from the second laser on the other side, what do you get? You get a hologram, and once the hologram is created it can be written and stored on these devices which are optical cylinders, which allows you to store a three-dimensional image or hologram in a two-dimensional space.

So what's the advantage? Well, in our old world with the hard drive that's spinning round and round like a CD or a record player, you write storage, you write data bits in two dimensions. Here, the hologram allows you to store the information in three dimensions. It allows you to put much more information into a smaller space and to retrieve it more quickly and how much data can holographic storage contain? Well, over the next several years experts predict that we'll eventually be able to have terabytes of information stored in a space no larger than several CDs stacked on top of each other. That's the promise of holographic storage.