Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

IBM and Plasmon, a British manufacturer of high-end removable storage, announced last week that they have agreed to bring Plasmon's ultra density optical (UDO) technology to the iSeries. UDO is a new storage technology that Plasmon is developing to satisfy a surge in data archiving capacity that is expected to occur as a result of new federal regulations affecting the financial, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries.

Plasmon's UDO drives are based on developments in laser research conducted by the Japanese company Nichia. Nichia's laser technology, called Blu-Ray, was originally developed to enable a new generation of higher-capacity DVD drives that can accommodate the additional data found in high definition television (HDTV) programs. Plasmon, which has its American headquarters near Denver, and had revenues of more than $100 million in 2002, is the only licensee of the technology for the commercial data market. The consumer version of this technology is still a couple years away from availability.

While Plasmon will start shipping its UDO drives and media for the broader IT market in August 2003, it will not be available for the iSeries at that time, and possibly not until 2004. It will require a new release of OS/400 to incorporate the changes needed to support UDO on the iSeries, says Andy Richards, Plasmon's vice president of business development. However, IBM is eager to bring the UDO technology to its iSeries customers and to provide a bridge from older optical technologies to UDO for large AS/400 and iSeries shops, Richards says.

As part of the agreement with Plasmon, IBM has pledged to provide iSeries attachment support for Plasmon's latest G-Series library, which uses traditional 5.25-inch, magneto-optical (MO) drives manufactured by Sony and uses the iSCSI data transfer protocol. When Plasmon starts shipping its new UDO drives, they will be compatible with all of its libraries and autoloaders built for the 5.25-inch libraries. However, these UDO drives, which will initially have 30 GB capacities, will not be backward-compatible with the 9.1 GB MO media; the drives will simply be installed in the 5.25-inch libraries that customers already have.

While the UDO drives will look much like their 5.25-inch MO brethren and will be compatible with MO libraries, the biggest market for the new UDO drives will likely be users of Plasmon's high-end, 12-inch, write once, read many (WORM) optical drives, Richards says. These expensive drives have long been the favorite of large insurance companies and banks that had to follow stringent archival regulations, such as the use of long-lasting and unalterable media. The UDO drives will be capable of satisfying both WORM and rewritable formats, but it will be UDO's WORM capability and its predicted 50-year lifespan that will propel its success, predicts Richards.

Richards says new government mandates, such as HIPAA in healthcare, 21 CFR Part 11 for pharmaceutical companies, and new mandates by the Securities and Exchange Commission are increasing storage needs. "The SEC mandate to archive all of their financial transactions, e-mails . . . that is driving storage requirements through the roof, and that's just the financial institutions," he said. "There are comparable mandates that the government" has imposed for other industries.

Plasmon's technology roadmap calls for introducing UDO with 30 GB capacity in 2003, followed by an increase to a 60 GB capacity drive in 2005, and a 120 GB capacity in 2007. Richards says the cost of the UDO drive will be comparable to the WORM drive, but that the UDO media will cost 20 percent of the price of WORM media. Data transfer rates are expected to be around 8 MB per second for the UDO drives, a 30 percent improvement over MO technology.