Optical Vaults to Sell Hitachi-LG Data Storage Blu-ray Disc Optical Archiving System

Hitachi-LG Data Storage, Inc. (HLDS), a joint company of Hitachi, Ltd. And LG Electronics, Inc., and Optical Vaults, LLC, an optical storage technology and services company, announced a joint sales and marketing agreement in which Optical Vaults will sell, integrate, and service the enterprise HLDS Blu-ray Disc (BD) Optical Archiving System.

The recently released HLDS BDL 500 Optical Disc Archive Library will be demonstrated at the NAB conference in Las Vegas, NE.

BDL 8500: 400TB (Holding 8 BDL 500 units), 6 foot rack

                                    
 
Under terms of the joint sales and marketing agreement, HLDS and Optical Vaults will collaborate on sales and marketing opportunities worldwide, particularly in the media and entertainment industry. HLDS is the world’s largest manufacturer of optical disc drives, and has maintained the industry’s leading market share position for 13 consecutive years. 

HLDS maintains firm relationships with media manufacturers and has collaborated with them to develop a new BD technology specifically developed for long-term archiving. The BDL 500 is an advanced photonics-based archive library, delivering a bit-error rate of greater than 10-²¹, which is far superior to that of tape-based systems. Power consumption for the BDL 500 is 125 watts, which represents a significant advancement in energy reduction for archival customers.
 
"The value of a trusted partner in the world’s largest media market for our Blu-ray archival system is significant, and we have a collaboration with Optical Vaults that will help accelerate the sales and marketing of what we feel is an ideal long-life, secure system for media archive," said Minho Choi, leader of enterprise data storage sales for HLDS. "We believe that the archival market will grow rapidly in the next years, and we are well-positioned to take share."
 
HLDS and Optical Vaults are addressing a market in which approximately 250PB of archival data are created each year, with an average capacity per archive of 1PB. The total worldwide capacity of the digital archive market is expected to grow almost 250% between 2013 and 2015, according to the Enterprise Strategy Group. According to the Information Storage Industry Consortium, archival storage revenues are growing at a 20% average, with the media & entertainment sector growing even more rapidly.
 
"There are tremendous opportunities for optical storage in long-term archiving. This new technology offers advantages in security, performance, and cost over hard drive and data tape storage options. The media and entertainment has been waiting for a cost-effective and easy-to-implement technology for long-term archiving of their valuable content," said Bland McCartha, VP of sales and marketing for Optical Vaults. "The HLDS system represents a step forward in how archives will address long-life storage, with scalability, and we believe the timing is right for our joint effort in this market."