Alliance Storage Technologies Inc. (ASTI / Plasmon)
Alliance Storage Technologies completed the acquisition of all Plasmon assets, including the full line of Plasmon libraries, drives, media, parts, and related inventory in January 2009. With this acquisition, Alliance Storage Technologies positioned itself to regain the leadership role in archival data storage and will continue to maintain and develop the Plasmon brand and solutions based on UDO-based optical storage technology. ASTI has actively recruited over 30 former Plasmon employees and other company professionals for key support, manufacturing, engineering, inside and outside sales positions. All ASTI Plasmon Library systems are manufactured in Colorado Springs in the former Plasmon plant.
The company intends to continue selling libraries with the Plasmon brand name to maintain continuity and build upon the legacy of exceptional quality, value and reliability of Optical storage. In addition, ASTI is offering a full range of service plans for all existing Plasmon installed libraries and newly sold systems
To ensure the highest level of service and support to consumers and partners, ASTI immediately rebuilt Plasmon’s US based support team responsible for technical and engineering support of the product lines. Customers under contract with ASTI are receiving excellent support from an experienced team with many years of history with the Plasmon product line, with access to all of the associated intellectual property such as firmware and software which can not be duplicated by any other vendor, positioning ASTI as the only vendor able to provide complete, comprehensive support and maintenance services.
In addition, projects involving the future development of the UDO technology are under review and plans are being formulated to restart Resarch & Development in key areas to advance optical storage to the next generation.
About Ultra Density Optical UDO
UDO is a blue-laser-based optical media that offers permanent, authentic-WORM (Write Once Read Many) storage, rated to last more than 50 years. Rewriteable and Compliant Write Once media types are also available. Unlike consumer market DVD and Blu-ray offerings, UDO is a commercial grade solution that maintains a ‘compliant’ data archive over a long period of time. UDO’s unique material properties and hardened plastic encasement support media handling and removability without causing damage to the stored information. The UDO blue-laser process is one of the only technologies that ‘guarantees’ data integrity through verification of every write operation to the media. It offers excellent performance through random access of data, unlike streaming technologies used for video and music. UDO’s 25-millisecond seek times are close to disk access speeds, yet have lower acquisition costs, use 15% of the power of disk and are much faster than tape and DVD. The media is water-proof and magnetic-proof and can be cleaned without losing data. UDO is backward compatible with older UDO drives, preserving the usability of the media over long periods of time.
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