E-Systems Inc’s Denver, Colorado mass storage systems specialist Emass Inc has acquired manufacturing and marketing rights to Creo Products Inc optical tape technology, on undisclosed terms, and says the move gives it control of a technology that has changed the economics of image and document storage. Emass will sell the Creo Optical Tape Recorder under its own name and will use the base Creo technology as the basis for new generations of optical tape-based storage systems. The Optical Tape Recorder is claimed to be capable of 1Tb of data on a tape; the recorder uses reels of write-once optical tape, making it appropriate for archival applications. The optical tape has a life expectancy of 20 years in normal conditions, more than 100 years in controlled environments. The recorder operates by using a high-power laser read-write head to burn microscopic pits in the active layer of the medium. A low power laser pulse is used for reading. The drive supports a sustained data rate of 3M-bytes per second, and is claimed to access any file on the 1Tb reel in an average of 65 seconds. It can emulate an IBM Corp 3480 tape drive and has an SCS interface. Drivers are available for HP-UX, Solaris and AIX. No prices were given for it.
