Sony has acquired a company specialized in backing up data on Blu-ray discs. The company is allegedly trying to market Blu-ray as a backup storage. Sony acquired Optical Archive, a company founded by Frank Frankovsky, a former Facebook Hardware Chief that left the social network last year.
Backing up to Blu-ray discs is especially interesting for large companies that want to store their documents relatively easily but not so fast that they want to pay a premium. The idea is to use Blu-ray backups as cold storage, meaning they are not connected to the internet.
According to Frankovsky, Blu-ray discs are able to hold their data up to 100 years in a data center with proper air conditioning. In air cooled datacentres the lifetime of a Blu-ray disc would be about 30 to 50 year. The optical discs are less sensitive to heat and moisture but dust could be an issue.
Current Blu-ray discs are able to hold about 50GB per disc and are mainly targeted for entertainment purposes. Frankosky plans to store 300GB per disc when his company Optical Archive launches its first commercial product later this year. The coming years the amount of data that fits on a Blu-ray disc should be increased to 1TB, Fortune reports.
Instead of traditional storage systems based on HDDs, optical storage systems require a rack or a room with closely stacked discs that can be picked up by a robotarm and then entered in a device than can read them. According to Frankosky there is a lot of interest from potential customers, therefore he decided to sell his company to Sony, the company behind Blu-ray, to be able to grow more rapidly.
Despite Sony's plan, optical discs are known to deteriorate over time, a phenomenon called Blu-ray rot has already been reported.
