Data centers could store information in glass for thousands of years

An automated system for storing large amounts of information in glass could change the future of data centers.

Our world runs on data, from the Internet and readings from countless industrial sensors to scientific data from particle accelerators, all of which must be stored securely and efficiently.

in 2014 Petr Kazansky at the University of Southampton in Great Britain and his colleagues have shown that lasers can be used to encode hundreds of terabytes of data into nanostructures inside glassthus creating a data storage method that could last longer than the age of the universe.

Their method was too impractical to be scaled up to industrial size, but Richard Cerny and his colleagues at Microsoft Project Silica have now demonstrated a similar glass-based technology that could lead to long-lasting glass data libraries in the near future.

“Glass resists extremes of temperature, moisture, particles and electromagnetic fields. In addition, glass has a long lifespan and doesn’t need to be replaced every few years. It also makes it a more sustainable medium. It requires very little energy to make and is easy to recycle when we’re done with it,” says Black.

The team’s process begins by using femtosecond lasers, which emit pulses of light lasting quadrillionths of a second, to transform data into tiny structures etched into thin layers of glass. When converting bits of data into these structures, the team also added additional bits to ensure fewer read and write errors.

The data could be read using a combination of a microscope and a camera, the images of which were then fed to a neural network algorithm that converted the information back into bits. The entire process was easily repeatable and automated, making the case for robotically controlled data devices.

The researchers were able to store 4.8 terabytes of data in a square piece of glass 120 millimeters wide and 2 millimeters thick—the equivalent of roughly 37 iPhones of storage in about a third the volume of one.

Based on accelerated aging experiments, such as heating the glass in a furnace, the team estimated that the data could remain stable and legible for more than 10,000 years at 290°C and even longer at room temperature. In addition, the researchers tested their method with borosilicate glass, which is cheaper than standard glass but can only hold less complex data.

Kazansky says the main breakthrough of Project Silica is that it offers an end-to-end system that can be scaled up to the data center level. The physical principles of glass-based data storage have been known for more than a decade, but the new work confirms that it can be turned into a viable technology, he says.

Microsoft is not the only company interested in pushing this technology towards the mainstream. Kazansky co-founded the company called SPhotonix which, for example, stored the human genome in a piece of glass. An Austrian start-up called Cerabyte similarly, it offers storage of large amounts of data in ultra-thin layers of ceramics and glass.

However, the question remains, for example, about the price of integrating glass libraries into existing data centers and whether the Project Silica team can increase the capacity of its glasses, which, according to the Kazan team’s work, should reach up to 360 terabytes.

Black says the clearest potential applications for Project Silica’s technology right now are wherever data must survive for centuries, such as national libraries, scientific repositories or cultural records. In collaboration with companies such as Warner Bros. and Global Music Vault, his team has also begun exploring data storage to be kept indefinitely and currently resides in the cloud, he says.

Kazansky says the technology was even featured in the movie Mission: Impossible – Final Showdown, where the protagonist found himself capable and safe enough to imprison a villainous artificial intelligence. “It’s a rare moment when Hollywood science fiction is actually grounded in our peer-reviewed reality,” he says.

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