Sony Acquires Optical Archive Inc.

Sony Corporation of America acquired Optical Archive Inc. (OAI), a start-up developing optical storage systems for the data center market.  Financial terms were not disclosed.

OAI was founded by Frank Frankovsky, who previosly was a lead hardware engineer at Facebook and who served as Chairman/President of the Open Compute Project.

Sony said it plans to leverage OAI to develop new optical disc library systems that will meet the technological demands from the growing cold archive market.

The term "cold archive" refers to a class of data that must be retained over a long period of time but isn't accessed frequently, such as cloud-based photo storage and data retained for legal or regulatory reasons. Cold archive is the largest and fastest growing portion of the data center storage market.

"This acquisition marks the beginning of our commitment to this growing market," said Terushi Shimizu, Senior Vice President and Deputy President, Device Solutions Business Group, Sony Corporation.  "Optical disc libraries will provide many advantages to customers who are currently using tape or hard drive technology to store cold data, such as lower costs, extremely durable media life, and higher data throughput rates. We plan to leverage and expand our existing optical disc production lines in order to accommodate the growing demand for this media."

"We are thrilled to be part of Sony," said Frank Frankovsky, CEO of OAI.  "Merging Sony's excellence in optical engineering and manufacturing with OAI's experience and capabilities in data center hardware design and operations will deliver innovative new storage solutions to customers."

http://www.sony.com