Data centers can 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 it all needs to be stored safely and efficiently.

In 2014, Peter Kazansky at the University of Southampton in the UK and his colleagues showed that lasers can be used to encode hundreds of terabytes of data into nanostructures inside glass, creating a data storage method that could outlast the age of the universe.

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

“Glass can withstand extremes of temperature, humidity, particles and electromagnetic fields. On top of that, glass has a long lifespan and doesn’t need to be replaced every couple of years. It also makes it a more sustainable medium. It takes very little energy to make and it’s easy to recycle when we’re done with it,” says Black.

The team’s process starts by using femtosecond lasers, which emit pulses of light lasting quadrillionths of a second, to convert data into tiny structures etched into thin layers of glass. As the team converted chunks of data into these structures, the team also added extra chunks that made for fewer read and write errors.

The data could be read with a combination of a microscope and a camera, whose images were then sent to a neural network algorithm that converted the information back into bits. The entire process was easily repeatable and automated, making a case for robot-powered data facilities.

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 about 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 data could remain stable and readable 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 could only accommodate less complex data.

Kazansky says the main breakthrough of Project Silica is that it offers an end-to-end system that can scale up to data centers. The physics principles behind 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 a company called SPhotonix which, for example, has stored the human genome in a glass. An Austrian startup called Cerabyte similarly offers to store large amounts of data in ultra-thin layers of ceramics and glass.

Questions still remain, for example, about the cost of integrating glass libraries into existing data centers and whether the Project Silica team can increase the capacity of its glasses, which should reach up to 360 terabytes based on the work of Kazansky’s team.

Black says the clearest potential applications for Project Silica’s technology right now are anywhere data needs to 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 to explore storing data that is meant to be stored indefinitely and currently resides in the cloud, he says.

Kazansky says the technology was even featured in the film Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, where the protagonist found it spacious and safe enough to capture a villainous artificial intelligence. “It’s a rare moment where Hollywood sci-fi is actually based on our peer-reviewed reality,” he says.