The future of storage: holographic and phase-change

Last week's EmTech 09 meeting played host to a panel discussion on the future of data storage. All three of the panelists were from companies that have a poorly known product on the market, and each of them discussed improvements that are in the pipeline, which we'll cover towards the end of this article. But they also provided a more general overview of the challenges facing storage technology at a time when data production is beginning to outstrip our ability to cope with it.

Ed Doller, of memory maker Numonyx, put things into perspective by discussing the launch of the iPhone 3GS. The hardware itself doesn't store all that much, but its capabilities led to downstream issues: within a few weeks of its release, mobile uploads of videos to YouTube had shot up by roughly 400 percent, and it's likely that other data-intensive activities will follow personal video before very long.