Transcript
Hi Mike. A Small World Big Data. And I've got really exciting thing to talk about today, and that is photonic storage. How are we going to put all this data? Where are we going to put it all? We're going to use light, obviously. I am here with Folio Photonics is going to help us explain what the current state of the industry is for storing data with optical technologies. It's coming to fruition. It's happening. Let's dive into it. I've got Steve Santa maria here today. Welcome, Steve. Welcome, Mike. How are you? Pleased to be here. All right. Let's just start a little bit with the industry of photonics and storing data optically. There have been a lot of things that have gone by in the past. We were going to store data higher hierarchically or with holographic. So we were going to store data on these big platters of sugar cubes and all this other stuff. What what's happened with that and why is this coming back around now? So a couple of things. If you look at the history of optical data storage, everyone knows it from the days of CDs, DVD's, Blu-ray's, it was the primary mechanism of which you distributed media. It was great. It was portable, it's very durable. All characteristics, by the way, that people want an enterprise storage, but it lacked capacity. And when you look back, I mean, almost 260 billion disks were made and distributed over 40 years. It was very lucrative business, but they did not continue to to to match the magnetic technologies in terms of the capacity per disk. And they got stuck. Blu ray got stuck at about a 100 to 125 gigabytes on a three layer disk. And that is that's been the height of their of their innovation. It couldn't get past it. And that's kind of what the breakthrough is that we're here to talk about. All right. So so people are familiar with Blu ray discs and CDs and stuff like that where we had lasers reading optical bits and bytes off of that. But we don't think of that as dense storage, obviously, because it was, you know, you put a movie on there and that's it. And it's not practical to just have that much storage. And I don't think there's even laptops made today with CD-ROMs in them anymore. Right. It's pretty hard to find. So you said there's a density problem. Where are we going? And is that is that the part of the the problem that Folio has addressed? Yeah, there are two things that Folio addresses, right? So when you when you scratch folio and it's at its core, we're a lot of material scientists behind that wall back there in labs based out of we're based out of Cleveland, Ohio, spun out of Case Western Reserve. That's kind of where where our specialty is. And when we look at the problem of a three layer Blu ray disc, you say, how can we increase capacity? There are two vectors. We can pack data in tighter, write in smaller, just smaller. Better lasers, I guess. Right? It's about lasers. A whole bunch of mechanical parts go to that. But also we can add layers. And so what we do is we pursue we pursue both vectors. Okay? So what we want to do is our first product will have versus standard three layer Blu ray disc will be an eight layer four side or 16 layer disk. And so right off the bat, three over eight, it's two and a half x the capacity if you're just using the density of Blu ray. But we've also advanced the technology of writing and reading, so we'll get a higher density. So we're hoping to have a, a one terabyte disk as our first product, which will be what's that times six times more or eight times more than a than a standard Blu ray disc that's available today. All right. So a one terabyte disk that starts to become relevant for a lot of people in terms of data storage and with ransomware and lots of other things, say people are really looking for truly immutable data storage. And there's also things that we want for e-discovery and other purposes where we just really need to true immutable that you can only really find maybe with tape today and even then you can destroy and overwrite tape. But let's assume tape is our standard. How did this comparing with the evolution in tape right. So well tape has you know, hats off to the tape, guys. I mean, I'm in awe when I first came to this company four years ago, and I'm looking through revisiting the store history. I have a background there. It but I have not touched in ten years. I thought tape was dead a long time ago. And sure enough, it's not it's a a vibrant multibillion dollar industry and they've done amazing things with capacity. And I mean, hats off to those engineers. But there are things that are interesting and we kind of start touch them earlier about optical, right? It's durability. You can touch this and you can stick it in and store it. You're not touching magnetic media. It lasts a very long time. And so when you start archiving data, you don't want to have to be remastering your archives and moving it all this time. I mean, it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to do so. And so these are kind of benefits. And also, look, it's a disk. It has random access, so it's much more searchable than something linear. The current LTO tapes are 4/10 of a mile long. If you want to find one file, you've got to spool that whole tape and that takes a lot of time. We're on a disk. You're going to find it easier and and faster so you have access to that data quicker. All right. So you're actually holding up some examples of what what we're talking about here. It's going to look like that. When you get this to market. Tape does have some other issues, too. Right. You mentioned it's magnetics. So there are certain places where a pulse of energy will destroy your tape. You put a magnet by it, for example, whereas optical has some longevity to it. No matter what's happening in the environment, I don't have to keep it as dry, for example, as tape. I don't have to keep it as protected from the elements. That's correct. I mean, there was a great demo, that one, the optical disc guys had on their website where the exact wax on stage and there's a a jar of muddy water, and he grabs a pair of tongs and reaches in and pulls out a disk, rinses it off, hits it with a dryer, wipes it down, sticks it in a place. I mean, it has that type of durability and that type of hardness to it that that people are attracted to. When you're in an environment, you're near the equator, high humidity, you're in an area that's not in a clean room of that type of a data center. You want something a little bit more robust. And this is one of the things that Optical does bring to you. I'd also like to put in put in a word about immutability, because I think that word is being misused by a lot of people today. They talk about immutability being something you can get in the cloud with read, write media. And I was like, Well, just because you change the credentials doesn't make it immutable, right? Just because you put it on a tape doesn't necessarily make it immutable unless you take that tape and put it in a closet and don't let anybody touch it. Right. It's there's there's a lot about immutability that I think people are fooling themselves with. It's a popular buzzword, right? Immutability. And when I look at when you see when you look at what's being stored, especially in the secondary storage, it's object storage, right? People are storing orders and by definition, objects need to be immutable. I mean, if I put a photograph out there, a I don't want to be written over and deleted, but more importantly, B, I don't want someone to come in there and take my my daughter's second grade photo and also give her blond hair or blue eyes. That's not her. Right. So the immutability is important for object storage. Do you think of any type of data like that? But you want to be protected. You want to save that format and you want to preserve it's data preservation. Preservation is what we're trying to get to. Right? Right. And if I if I'm relying on that cloud service provider, yeah, they can do a really great job of security. But eventually, if something could change that media, it's not technically immutable just because it has security concerns around it, but say, cloud providers actually burning stuff on these optical disks, those become immutable by nature of what they. Are by nature. But. It's the inherent nature of the optical product. All right. And just one more thing on tape. So in terms of the cost of tape two versus your projected cost with this, obviously to bring this to market, you're going to have to drive the cost per terabyte down to a certain point where you aiming just so people can get their heads around it. So the advantage is follow has is how we manufacture traditionally an optical disk is additively manufactured. They add layer sputtering spin coating, buffer layer, active, etc. What we do is we make a film, right? So the film is chemically is a composition of a of active materials embedded in polymers, and it's extruded. And for us we just make one cut, boom, laminate that to the substrate and you have a disc and not a ghost. It's inherently very cost effective. I'm holding up this a 14 inch film. We're looking at a machine that'll make them two meters wide, right? 400 feet an hour. You make a lot of capacity in that way. That allows us to get our costs very much under control. And when we can control your cost, we have a be able to pass through great pricing. We've been saying publicly to a lot of people that will be at that 3 to $5 a terabyte range when we release our first product. Okay. Okay. And that's coming just in a couple of years. Your time horizon for for for production forecast here is is relatively short given where you're at. Well, it's two years, but we have a lot we have four or five years of history to get to this point. Right. Okay. We we have straightened out the manufacturing. We know how to manufacture the films. We know how to make the disk It took. The while is the proof point we're showing here is the writing and reading to the eight layers is what we announced yesterday. And the difficulty there is we had to and we weren't planning to do this, but we had to build our own drive and our own tester. This is a little bit of a step back from COVID because we're working with partners, but then COVID hit and all of a sudden we weren't flying to visit engineers at other companies anymore. Those days were done and we had to pull all that in-house and build it ourselves. And that's kind of what we've been through up to this point now. All right. And there's more advances clearly that you could be doing with more layers, stronger lasers. And just in case someone really is technical and following along, how do you layer stuff up that's kind of based on that Blu ray reflective concept? Doesn't don't the layers interfere with each other? Great question. We do not use a reflective dye. Oh, okay. The basis of ours is fluorescent. So we're on a Blu ray, the lasers coming up and bouncing over the pits and the zeros and the one. Yeah. Let's go back and collect it. What we're doing is as we cross the disk with the laser when we're doing the read function. It creates a fluorescence of light, and we measure the contrast between darkness to light. This becomes our zero once, and. You can focus those lasers at different depths as the thing is traveling, right? I've got I've got a I've got a laser engraver here that can sort of do that already a little bit. Well, this is one of the advantages, because in the past you've heard of technologies like holographic, etc., where they're putting data into kind of a 3D medium, but now you have to find that data. And so when you have layers on a disk, you know, one dimensions taken care of, it's on a plane. So now we're just going X, Y, and we do the tracking against that spiral around that layer that we can drop down at the next layer and read, etcetera like that. It's much simpler, much easier to find your data or to to write it down. Right. And you're taking advantage of decades of development, of spinning media. Right. To take take the take the best parts of that in terms of moving the laser to the right place and reading it and knowing where it is on the tracks and segments and stuff. And you're just really working on that media to make, make, make a denser media, which is which is pretty genius actually, down there. Thank you. We think so. But I know that was a question, but that was pretty good. Great point, because we can leverage 40 years worth of disk technology and ecosystem. This is a standard Blu ray substrate, right? Okay. Okay. You're not even make a new substrate. You're just buying these off the shelf. We just laminate it, create it. Now with that, then comes to drive the spindles, the the housings, the motors. A lot of that stuff is reused and it's over the shelf material that we can use. Now there's modification on the optical pickup unit because now we have to focus that laser on eight layers versus three, but that we're we're well down the path. We've definitely, definitely segmented the problem down to things that are tractable for what you're doing and believable. If you already got to eight layers, getting to 16 or doubling that in Moore's Law kind of thinking is is just inevitable. So with that, there is so much to get into here. Steve There's a real revolution coming. If you guys get this to market in the two years that you're planning on, people are really going to wake up and look and say, Hey, the world shifted for big data and for cloud storage and for well. We believe so. I mean, the the thing about data when you look at is the world's generating data at a precipitous rate. And it used to be you'd use it, throw it away or just store pieces of it. But with the rise of AI and machine learning all these tools, what they're finding is that data has value and they want to start they want to analyze it, they want to dig deeper. So so people want to store their data longer. And so now you start running a problem as a do I have the capacity to store it longer and be does the medium right? It too? Does it last a long time? When we talk to satellite imagery companies, you know, they have the satellites been up there for 30 years or so. They have 30 years worth of data. They don't want to delete any of that. They do all that compare and contrast all that analysis. So you have to have an effective and efficient way to store that data and then be able to retrieve it. So we see it as really being very opportunistic that I don't think any of the current storage technologies go away per say. I think all are needed, all have their swim lane. We think there's a very specific part for archival data that you would like to have faster access to or be able to find random, be a random access to get to a quicker. That is a swim line for us. That's where we'll start and that's where we're excited to kind of launch the product. And with this week I being in the news, you know, we're trying to send a rocket to the moon, our teams where, you know, you've got Elon trying to send rockets to Mars in that same timeframe. Space is a dangerous environment for magnetic media. So I think this is lining up with that, too. Steve, I don't you don't have to give us any hints, but I'm thinking. We had we received the call, we got a call from the US Space Command, I don't know, about a year ago, year and a half ago. And does your storage work in absolute zero? And we're like, I don't know. We never tested that. I mean, that's for that, right? But it was a funny conversation. So we started looking at some of the extremes. There's no reason that it wouldn't. We looked at they start looking into the polymer base, does the plastic become brittle or something happen? But one of the advantages does have and this we talked about at length with them is you don't have to shield the media and there's all kinds of radiation in space. Right? It's not good for magnetic. So what they do is they have to kind of shield the storage in like a lead in a container, which adds weight. And if you know anything about space, every ounce costs thousands of pounds. Launching, launching led into space is a foolish thing to be doing. It's not a good thing to do. So, yeah, there's there's some opportunities there. All right. And I notice there's a film shape, too. So we talk a lot about reusing the Blu ray factors, but I just think of like you're going to be making clothing out of this stuff soon. We're going to be wearing petabytes of this plastic film around with us wherever we're going anyway. Steve, if someone's more interested in this, wants to keep up with Folio and Folio Photonics, what you guys are doing, where you're at in your cycles, where would you point them out? Well, you go to our website. Ww Portfolio Photonics, we keep that updated, we keep kind of a newsfeed there and we put a lot of effort and. We're on LinkedIn, we have a Twitter know we've all the typical social media things, but you know, and you can always pick up the phone and call us or if you're in Ohio, stop by, knock on the door and I'll give you a tour. I'm not I'm not sure you should do that, because there's a lot of people here who live in Ohio, I'm sure. Nearby. And and eventually you'll be hiring, right? That's the definition of hiring. That's all right. Thank you much for being here, Steve, today. Thank you, Mike. And do come back when you've got some some more things that you want to talk about and show us in deeper because this is a fascinating topic. I think everybody here is interested in it. So great. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks.
