Storage Technology Inc CEO, Dave Weiss, says that as the company’s storage area network (SAN) and Vista architecture-based products become more prevalent, the role of the firm’s software – which manages functions including prioritizing storage space for different applications – will become more dominant. He says that customers will require management software to make best use of existing tape and disk storage facilities.
Weiss was at the CeBIT technology fair in Hannover, Germany to launch the company’s PowerBak mobile storage product and its 9820 tape drive. He also commented on Storagetek’s work with crystal holographic storage. The experimental storage system, which is still years away from production, stores data on crystals. Each crystal can hold at least a Terabyte of data. Weiss says that the problem with the system is that crystals erode over time, corrupting the data held on them. In addition, he says that it will be a long time before the system can match the price performance levels of tape and disk.
