Imagine storing 20,000 X-ray images on a disk the size of a credit card. That's one grand promise stirring up the buzz over holographic storage for the enterprise.

Hal Weiss, systems engineer with Baptist Memorial Healthcare in Memphis, Tenn., is one user following the holographic storage buzz. Weiss sees holographic storage as a means to handle the increasing amount of data - medical images and X-rays - he must archive to meet Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requirements.

"I'm interested in holographic storage for the simple fact that you can store just a huge amount of data in a small space and the retrieval times are enormously faster. I'm hearing that holographic storage can recover millions of bits of data a second and can sustain that reliably," says Weiss, who uses EMC's Centera, Copan Systems' Revolution 200T and a big DVD jukebox in his organization to store 48T bytes of data.

Analysts and enterprise users such as Weiss see a future in holographic disk technologies as archival, long-term storage media. Financial records and high-definition video used in broadcast media also are data types eyed for holographic storage.

Like other technologies such as Serial ATA, holographic storage has its roots in consumer-based products. The charge-coupled devices (CCD) and LCDs found in digital cameras are used in holographic storage to read the data back. The drives will be costly, but the price is expected to fall once more vendors adopt holographic storage.

Two approaches

Storage watchers hold out the most hope for a technology under development at InPhase Technologies , a Bell Labs spinoff. Called polytopic recording, this holographic approach records through the depth of the media in three dimensions. Holography records and reads 1 billion bits of data with each flash of light, InPhase says. To record a holographic image, a laser beam is split in two - the signal beam carries the data; the reference beam positions where the data is written and reads it. The data is arranged in a checkerboard pattern of light and dark pixels, each pixel being formed when the two beams intersect.