MONTEREY, CA -- Organizations that until now have not been able to access and use their archived data easily will soon be able to do just that, creating new and useful information for competitive advantage. And it is holographic data storage systems that will unlock that information. "Most companies treat archived data as write-once, read-never, because it is hard to access and harder still to work with. Holographic storage changes all that," said Glenn Horner, vice president of business development at Aprilis, Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., company that is developing the first commercial holographic data storage system. Speaking at the annual meeting of the National Storage Industry Consortium, Horner said that while conventional magnetic- and optical-based technologies will continue to be important for storing large amounts of data, holographic storage will become the storage technology of choice for archived data because it offers significantly faster data access and read rates than either of the other technologies. "Cost-effective, high performance, high capacity data storage systems will be a critical enabler for many future telecommunications, medical, general business, and Internet applications, which is what holographic data storage provides," said Horner. Aprilis has developed a revolutionary recording medium that satisfies all of the necessary requirements for high capacity, high performance holographic storage, said Horner. The patented Aprilis technology -- which will allow a five-inch disk to hold more than 100 gigabytes of data -- forms the basis of an advanced holographic data storage system that the company is now developing. Accessing and Using Archived Data Is the Problem Finding specific text-based information in data archives is time consuming and difficult. Doing the same with image-based information is nearly impossible. Even if users locate the data they need, their ability to quickly retrieve and use it for further analysis is most frequently stymied because storage methods and access tools often use different technologies. "This is why many people consider archived data write-once, read-never," explained Horner. "In the end they give up trying to access the data. But they also forfeit the ability to mine a wealth of information that their organization spent a lot of time, money, and effort collecting." While there have been some modest improvements in data density and transfer rates in optical- and magnetic tape-based storage media, Horner said these media are unlikely to provide the data density and performance required by the explosive growth in data storage performance requirements. "Conventional optical systems are too slow and do not have nearly enough capacity, and tape systems do not provide the necessary random access and parallelism required to rapidly deliver data to multiple users on demand," according to Horner. For more information visit www.aprilisinc.com