Tokyo, Japan - Sony Corporation and Panasonic Corporation announced today that they have reached an agreement for a joint venture to develop a next-generation optical disc for professional digital data storage.

The synergies from the partnership are expected to capitalize on the technologies held by both respective companies and result in the development of an optical disc with a recording capacity of at least 300GB by the end of 2015.

The key feature of optical discs has always been to keep them protected against the environment, such as dust and water resistance, and also immune to severe changes in temperature and humidity within the environment where they are stored. Both Sony and Panasonic have earlier invested into and developed products such as the Blu-ray™ format, but realize now that optical discs will need to accommodate much large volumes of storage in years to come given the expected future growth in the active market.

One of Sony’s previous ventures was to commercialize a file-based optical disc archive system in September 2012, which was a system housing twelve optical discs as a single, high-capacity storage solution. The total range of storage capacity was anywhere between 300GB to 1.5TB.

Similarly, Panasonic has developed its ‘LB-DM9’ series of optical disc storage devices, which offers a 90 magazine capacity, with a total storage space of 180TB. These devices are capable of rapid data transfer performance of up to 216MB/S, which utilizes an indigenously developed changer system along with RAID technology to deliver these results.

The increasing need for archive capabilities has been from rapidly-growing industries such as motion pictures and broadcasting, as well as cloud data centers which have exploded in popularity following the evolution in network services. Both Sony and Panasonic have a proven track record in developing Blu-ray Disc™ format technologies and this partnership augers well for the future.

In recent years, there has been an increasing need for archive capabilities, not only from video production industries, such as motion pictures and broadcasting, but also from cloud data centers that handle increasingly large volumes of data following the evolution in network services. Both Sony and Panasonic have a proven track record in developing Blu-ray Disc™ format technologies, and by actively promoting the adoption of a new standard for next-generation high-capacity optical discs, they intend to offer solutions that preserve valuable data for future generations.

The press release for the article can be found here.