Optical Technologies (CD & DVD)
Also playing a role to some degree with archiving are write-once and re-writable optical technologies, from CD to DVD, in the popular 8cm format ranging in storage capacity from 650MB through to 27GB (Blu-Ray).
However, optical storage represents only around two or three percent of the storage market. According to IDC, it's largely a dormant market -- most of the industry have realised it is far more cost effective to use high-volume low-performance magnetic disks with tape libraries to move data offsite.
Despite much touting of the CD in past years, this is happening because of the rapid change in optical technology during the past 15 or 20 years. "It has gone through many generations of evolution, and while software associated with magnetic technology can more or less cope with the increasing capacities and changes, each generation of optical evolution has required often complete updates of hardware as well as software," says IDC analyst Graham Penn.
Years ago optical was a solid solution to long-term data retention, but we've all seen CDs showing degradation and breakdown.
Penn says that there will probably remain specialist and niche areas where optical storage will remain the method of choice, however, there are far more examples of companies who originally invested in optical storage -- now opting for a disk and tape solution as costs come down and volumes expand.
For those interested in what is out there, refer back to our review of the JVC Professional MC-8100U Digital Storage System, which is primarily tailored for users who need vast amounts of near-line network archiving storage with random access.
Products
We received products from Apple, Iomega, Quantum, Snap Appliance, and Sun. Although this archiving overview was more about hardware it is widely acknowledged that the hardware would be nothing without the software behind it, therefore we also took a look at Veritas' new archiving solution.
