In addition to its storage issues, Turner Entertainment needs to feed its growing internal bandwidth, Tarasoff said. The company now has 96 1Gbit/sec. Ethernet connections, but it plans to upgrade those to 10Gbit/sec. streams in the near future to feed 32 different networks, Tarasoff said.

Last month, Turner Entertainment tested a prototype holographic disk array called Tapestry, which is made by InPhase Technologies Inc. in Longmont, Colo. InPhase plans to ship production models of its array next year, as does Japanese vendor Optware Corp., which in October opened a U.S. branch of its holographic disk storage business. It hopes to break the 1TB capacity mark for disks by 2008.

Optware's technology works by shining a green laser through the disk and then recording data in the polymer resin. A shiny surface on the bottom of the disk -- made of the same material used on the surface of today's CDs and DVDs -- then reflects that data back to the laser so it can be read.

Tarasoff said InPhase's hardware performed flawlessly, feeding a promotional spot to its networks about as quickly as its tape library system does. 'Their production version promises to be much faster than tape, but we've not seen that yet,' Tarasoff said.

He said the test, well ahead of production rollouts of the product, was performed partly as an 'internal PR' exercise 'to prove to our own executives that we have a solution down the line, and we want to prepare for that rather than just thinking we're eight to 10 years away from something.'