The Permanent Storage Company. Archival Data Storage with Laser Tape.

Opternity is building the future of industrial storage data requirements for the 21st century. Opternity proprietary tapes and tape drives will store 10 -100 times more data than traditional magnetic tapes.

Optical Tape Storage

Capacity 10X+ greater than current LTO tape
True WORM (write-once-read-many) compliant

 

Market

Permanent Storage Market The market for permanent storage was $1.5 billion in 2005, $2.5 billion in 2010 and is expected to be $4 billion in 2014.
This includes all tape drives and cartridge media, as well as (automated) library sytems and data management software.
It is driven by the growing capacity needs for permanent storage that are expected to grow over 50% per year for the remainder of this decade.
The permanent (archival) storage market is not to be confounded with the backup/recovery/restore market, which in the past was also the classical domain of (magnetic) tape systems, but has been largely subsumed by more convenient disk drive systems for this purpose.

In recent years the archival storage market has emerged in its own right as a fast growing segment.

Vertical Markets

Early customers will be concentrated in vertical markets currently faced with high demands for archival and reference data. Government regulation drives a significant portion of archival storage demand. Regulated industries have inelastic demand for certain archival storage.

Finance
The SEC requires contractual and financial information to be held in write-once/read-only form for seven years. More recent regulations have mandated the archiving of all email transactions and phone conversations.

Medical
Recent HIPPA regulations require patient records and medical images to be held for the life of the patient plus twenty years, and to be available on short notice.

Pharmaceutical
Companies must keep associated records for the life of the drug plus twenty years.
The growth of permanent digital reference data and voluntary archiving is driven by organizations that purvey information as their primary value proposition.

Government
Economic and census data, digitization of national archives initiative, security data acquisition.

Fundamental research
Meteorology, Astronomy, Particle Physics, etc.

Financial/Insurance Services
Reference to historical financial and economic data, actuarial data for health, life, casualty insurance, etc.

Entertainment
Stock Photography, stock video, animation.

Geophysical
Geosciences, Seismic data, Remote sensing data.

Bioscience
Genomics, Proteomics.

These organizations accumulate permanent data at rates approaching thousands of Terabytes (Petabytes) per year.