Optical Storage Oppourtunities or Obsolence?

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• We are talking about archiving, not straight storage. Firstly you shouldn’t be archiving on hard disks, no matter how much storage capacity you have. It simply makes no sense from a technical, functional, compliance, and archival perspective. Archives must be on long term removable media that will require no migrations every few years, cost astronomical amounts to power and cool (between spin ups and spin downs), unpredictably fail (we all know about how disk clusters fail), must be available in the long term and more importantly must be written in non proprietary format. Hard disk does not meet any of this requirements regardless of how large a capacity you have.
  When organizations talk about archiving it’s because they already have disk clusters and are referring to professional grade information archiving based on ILM (information lifecycle management) protocols. This is an indicator of whats to come. These market processes take time, especially in unpredictable economic situations. As you can see for yourself, the adoption rate for blu ray at both levels (consumer and enterprise) has not only been steadily growing but particularly in the enterprise space it’s been on an upward trend. For those who keep basing blu rays economics on events of last century, let me remind you that you can’t solve today's problems with yesterdays solutions. Neither can you analyze today's trends based on last century's events. When a company invests in blu ray as their optical archiving media of choice, they are adopting an information lifecycle management strategy.
  As for UDO - that technology has failed because Plasmon adopted a proprietary strategy in the hope of collecting licensing fees from anyone (manufacturers, users etc) remotely interested in UDO. Blu Ray has become the de-facto standard (add Toshiba giving up it's HD pipe dreams and joining the blu ray consortium as of a week ago).
  There is a place for disk, tape and optical but which platform will be the standard adopted on all 3 platforms is now taking shape. For optical I'm betting on blu ray, disk is disk and tape may remain LTO variations. However, the UDO's, PDD's etc are at their 18th holes.
  I rest my case.

  Alani Kuye
  Phantom Data Systems Inc.

• Thanks Alani for the comments.

  I take it that you are a bluray fan which is fine; I’m not hung up on any one technology or medium other than applying what makes sense to meet specific needs and requirements as opposed to solutions looking for problems.

  A wild guess, you are not a fan of tape or removable hard disk drives (RHDD) as a long term archive medium?

  I like your analogy of comparing to last century, particularly since even the oldest of digital data storage technologies are barely over a 1/2 century old.

  Again, appreciate your comments and perspectives, good to see some are still pushing optical which counters those who claim no one is doing optical.

  Cheers
  gs