Data centres 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 colliders, and all of this data must be stored securely and efficiently.

In 2014, Peter Kazansky of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and his colleagues showed that lasers could be used to encode hundreds of terabytes of data in nanostructures inside glass, creating a method of data storage that could last longer than the age of the universe.

Their method was too impractical to scale up to an industrial scale, but Richard Black and his colleagues at Microsoft’s Project Silica have now demonstrated similar glass-based technology that could lead to long-lived glass data libraries in the near future.

“Glass can withstand extreme temperatures, humidity, particles and electromagnetic fields. On top of that, glass has a long lifespan and does not require replacement every two years. This also makes it a more durable medium. It requires very little energy to manufacture and it is easy to recycle once we are done with it,” says Black.

The team’s process begins by using femtosecond lasers, which emit pulses of light lasting quadrillions of a second, to convert data into tiny structures etched into thin layers of glass. By transforming bits of data into these structures, the team also added additional bits ensuring 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 which converted the information back into bits. The entire process was easily repeatable and automated, making the case for robot-operated data facilities.

The researchers managed to store 4.8 terabytes of data in a square piece of glass 120 millimeters wide and 2 millimeters thick, which equates to about 37 iPhones’ worth of storage in about a third of the volume of one.

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

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

Microsoft is not the only company interested in making this technology widespread. Kazansky co-founded a company called SPhotonix that, for example, stored the human genome in a piece of glass. An Austrian start-up, Cerabyte, also proposes storing large amounts of data in ultrathin layers of ceramic and glass.

Questions remain, however, such as about the cost of integrating the glass libraries into existing data centers and whether the Silica project team can increase the capacity of its glasses, which is expected to reach up to 360 terabytes based on the work of Kazansky’s team.

Black says the clearest potential applications of Project Silica technology are currently found anywhere data needs to survive for centuries, such as national libraries, scientific repositories, or cultural archives. In collaboration with companies such as Warner Bros. and Global Music Vault, his team also began exploring the storage of data intended to be retained indefinitely and that currently resides in the cloud, he says.

Kazansky says the technology was even featured in the film Mission: Impossible – The Final Judgment, where the protagonist found it spacious and safe enough to trap a nasty artificial intelligence. “This is a rare moment where Hollywood science fiction is actually based on our peer-reviewed reality,” he says.