Henry O’Connell - Millenniata
Henry O’Connell is the CEO and President of Millenniata, a new and innovative company spinning off from Brigham Young University. Millenniata and BYU have developed a digital storage medium that will remain readable and reliable for up to a thousand years. We caught up with Henry to find out more about this technology and how the company plans on pushing it to market.
Silicon Slopes: Can you describe for us what Millenniata is, and how your technology is changing the landscape of the digital preservation of data?
Henry O'Connell: Millennial Disc™ Our primary product is a digital storage medium that will remain readable and reliable over centuries. We will be the first and only source for low-cost, extremely long-term, reliable and stable data storage medium and disc-writing devices. TheMillennial Disc™and follow-on derivatives (Millennial Blu-ray™) will meet this need. These products will provide backwards compatibility with legacy disc readers allowing customers to preserve IT investments and tried and true digitized, encrypted, cataloged and archived flows.
In the future, Millenniata expects to produce versions of the Millennial Disc™ that are sized for the needs of the specialized professional market. Simply increasing the disc diameter from the standard 120 mm (just over 5 inches) to 200 mm (approximately 8 inches) or 250 mm (approximately 10 inches) substantially increases the area on the disc and its storage capacity. Moving to 250 mm, for example, will provide 4.3 times the area, taking a DVD at standard storage density from 4.7 GB to about 20 GB, similar in storage capacity to conventional magnetic tape reels with much less volume per tape. Expanding the Blu-ray version of theMillennial Disc™to the same size would result in a capacity over 100 GB per disc. Based on the thickness of such a disc and proper storage packaging, we anticipate that at least 8-250 mm diameter Blu-ray Millennial Discs™ could be stored in the same volume as a single conventional magnetic tape reel, resulting in the storage of approximately 800 GB in the volume currently used to store 20 to 30 GB.
A Millennial Disc™ looks very similar to existing CDs or DVDs. It will have the same physical size, will have the same substrate material and can be packaged with pre-printed labels or manufactured to customer specification for branding and numbering for archival purposes. These characteristics guarantee that once volume production is in place, the cost of each disc will be competitive with current long-term storage solutions. The most striking difference of the Millennial Disc™ is the much darker color of the bottom (data) side of the disc. Combined with the “rainbow effect” that is common to all DVD’s, this makes for a visually striking and attractive product since the rainbow of colors flashes over the surface as the disc is tilted back and forth. It will be easy for customers to tell that this product is unique. While these improvements may sound impressive, they are not the ultimate vision. A 250 mm diameter disc is neither the limit in size nor is the Blu-ray disc the ultimate in storage density. The use of higher-powered UV lasers will lead to further increases in storage density, by a factor of 2 to 5 times. Millenniata will be able to stay currentwith upcoming technology trends.
The Millennial Writer™ is the product that will record data on the Millennial Disc™. In appearance, it will look like your typical computer accessory, though somewhat larger in size, with a tray or a magazine to load the Millennial Disc™ to be written and a Firewire, USB or other high-speed connection to a PC. With the exception of the optical sub-system (altered to work with a high-power laser), the inside mechanics of the drive will be similar to legacy disc writers. The laser will be sealed inside the case of the Millennial Drive™ to protect users. The size of the first products will be largely dictated by the size of the higher-power laser systems. The lasers, known as Diode-pumped Solid State or DPSS lasers will be used in the first products. They are somewhat larger than a shoebox in size and run on 110 volt power. They typically function for 10,000 hours or more before the internal optics need maintenance or replacement. With 24 hour per day operation, this will be sufficient to keep the drive in continuous operation for about 1 year. Since these systems are expected to need service every 12 to 15 months, Millenniata will generate revenue from service contracts on these drives.
Millennial Writers™ are expected to shrink significantly in size as laser technology improves. Millenniata expects to migrate from one laser technology to future technologies as these improvements continue. This migration will lead to smaller and less expensive products over the next five years. The ultimate laser for most applications is expected to be a laser diode. Today, it is possible to obtain ½ watt red laser diodes from suppliers such as Sony Corp. for a few hundred dollars. The green and blue lasers that Millenniata will use are advancing. When such lasers are available, the Millennial Drive™ can be reduced in size to be comparable to current DVD and Blu-ray drive mechanisms.
Silicon Slopes: Where did the inspiration for the technology come from and how was the technology developed?
Henry O'Connell: When Dr. Barry Lunt took his Scouts in 1995 to visit the Anasazi Indian petro glyphs in Nine-Mile Canyon (near Price, Utah), little did he realize he would be inspired to invent a new permanent DVD that would preserve information for generations. Dr. Lunt, a genealogist and professor of information technology at Brigham Young University, examined these Anasazi Indian writings and learned that instead of being paintings (as he originally thought); they were created by chipping away dark rock to expose a lighter layer of rock beneath. And they had survived for many centuries! Years later, when he saw the urgency in the need to store computer data permanently, he recalled how the Anasazi Indians had made their petro glyphs and reasoned that their solution could be transferred over to optical storage technology (CDs and DVDs). So, he teamed with Dr. Matthew Linford from the BYU Chemistry Department, an expert in surface chemistry, to reproduce the Anasazi’s simple recipe for immortal records. After several months they found that a material similar to obsidian (a hard, dark glass) could be permanently bound to a reflective metal. This obsidian-like surface could then be etched away to record the data in ones and zeros instead of petro glyphs. Since the materials used in this method of optical storage are not subject to the changes of heat or time, the data is literally carved in stone. The BYU Technology Transfer Office then went to work to file the initial patents and encourage a company to spin-off from the University. BYU identified two other experts in start-up development: physicist and CTO, Dr. Doug Hansen and veteran CEO Henry O’Connell to give leadership and experience to the team. The company, Millenniata, Inc. has been approached by leaders in information archiving from genealogy to the film industry, as well as from state health and vital statistics data centers to those who oversee the U.S. National Archives.
Silicon Slopes: Are your products are still in development or ready for distribution?
Henry O'Connell: Millenniata Inc. is ready to distribute both the Millennial Disc™ and Millennial Drive™ during fourth quarter 2008. We will have the Library of Congress test and certify the Millennial Disc™ before product launch. We strongly believe that the Millennial Disc™ will be the gold standard for archival medium.
Silicon Slopes: Can you indicate the price points for these products?
Henry O'Connell: During 2009, Millenniata Inc. will outreach to targeted markets. With the advent of technology we expect the Millennial Drive™ to compete with existing DVD Drives. The Millennial Disc™ has fewer parts than a regular DVD Disc allowing us to be price competitive with existing product.
Silicon Slopes: How is the technology being received? Any traction in terms of sales?
Henry O'Connell: Millenniata Inc. and its technology are being very well received by all who have been approached. We plan to place Millennial Drives™ and Millennial Discs™ with the States of Utah, Wyoming and Connecticut by year’s end. We will also have product placed in Federal Agencies such as the Library of Congress and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms as well as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We are also working closely with targeted key corporate partners.
Silicon Slopes: Who are your competitors? Are there other technologies similar to yours emerging in the data storage space?
Henry O'Connell: We feel that we have found a long-sought niche in the realm of data storage and archiving. Rather than looking at existing technology as competitors, we will be another layer of security for those needing to archive data. Eventually as the market understands our value, it will naturally migrate to a truly Write Once Read Forever™ medium. Millenniata Inc. will truly unshackle those who store data from work they have done in the past. This will free them up to manage future needs rather than continually revisiting past labors.
Silicon Slopes: There appears to be an enormous market potential for your product. What industries will you market to first?
Henry O'Connell: We will first target the aforementioned markets. By 2010, Millenniata Inc. will target the remainder of state governments and several federal agencies. Soon thereafter, we will be in a position to penetrate the consumer market.
Silicon Slopes: You are currently seeking funding for product development, operations and marketing. How is this effort going? What type of financing are you looking for?
Henry O'Connell: We are currently in the process of closing funding. We should be fully funded by the end of August, 2008.
Silicon Slopes: Your technology came out of Brigham Young University Is Millenniata still receiving support and utilizing BYU resources?
Henry O'Connell: Millenniata Inc. is working very closely with the BYU Technology Transfer Office. We continue to work with the inventing professors, who sit on our board as founders, and are involved with product development. We feel it is very important for us to continue our relationship with the university, as it is mutually beneficial to do so. We look to our relationship with BYU as a partnership; Millenniata Inc. is sharing and utilizing resources with the university.
Silicon Slopes: Are you concerned at all that your discs might last too long, thereby eliminating the potential revenue for replacement discs?
Henry O'Connell: The growing amount of data being created by each of these markets is both astounding and exponential. Our ease in creating pictures and documents has now exceeded our ability to preserve it for future generations. Dr. Gabriel Silberman, senior vice-president and head of CA Labs, leads their corporate mandate to link business and academic efforts to promote advanced research in systems and security management. Dr. Silberman wrote in a special article to The Globe and Mail.1
“We are facing a growing dilemma in storage. It is a dilemma that, if unresolved, will prove to wreak disastrous consequences for corporate compliance and efficiency in the next three to five years.…
“Compliance needs, and the pervasive nature of information, are coming to a head to create a major storage crunch. Unlike storage problems of the past, this will not be related to the need for more storage hardware. The need to have reliably preserved and searchable information means we need new methods of storing data.” [1]
The Director of the National Archives and Records Administration’s Electronic Record Archives has published that they archive 10,000 terabytes (or 10 million gigabytes) of data annually and this amount is growing exponentially.
In our conversations with government, religious and academic experts in the field of data storage, we are very confident that with the exponential growth of data, Millenniata Inc. is uniquely positioned to fill a need the industry has been desperate to secure.
Millenniata Inc. is confident that our technology and product has just reached the tip of the iceberg that is data storage.
