Data storage in glass: Superman has already been immortalised

This is blog 9 in the blog series about Green IT.

The last innovative storage technique that does seem promising, certainly for digital heritage, uses glass. Microsoft has been researching this possibility for several years now, in its Project Silica. Researchers use specially manufactured glass to store large amounts of data for the long-term and in a sustainable manner. In this blog we explain how this method works. (1)

Project Silica started in 2019 as an experiment, originally intended as an alternative for physical storage options. However, during their research scientists discovered that glass can accommodate a very high information density, which gave a new direction to the study. Microsoft thought it might offer a potential replacement for cloud storage, in the future.

To illustrate the information density: a coaster-sized glass plate would suffice to store 1.75 million songs, the novel ‘War and Peace’ 875,000 times over, plus 3500 films. All in all, the glass plate can accommodate up to 500 TB of data. (2)

Most sustainable form of data storage

Anyone familiar with digital preservation knows that most of the existing storage methods are finite. This compels us to repeatedly copy data to newer, more sustainable formats. But repeated copying not only means costs in terms of money, energy and time, but also puts the data at risk.

Glass storage appears to offer a sustainable alternative that can remain unchanged for up to 10,000 years. Glass is also resistant to extreme heat and cold, doing away with the need to maintain a stable and specific temperature (and the associated power consumption). Glass is also resistant to electromagnetic pulses. (3)

Important milestone: Superman on glass

TV and film producer Warner Bros has been searching for quite some time for a sustainable storage solution for its film archives, without the need to transfer the files to new storage media every few years again. In partnership with Microsoft they took on the challenge of performing a 'proof of concept' regarding the storage of films on glass. And successfully so: the film Superman was stored on and retrieved from glass, including the technical metadata that keeps files accessible and usable in the future. This experiment marked an important step toward finding a sustainable way to store vast amounts of data, with a view to the environment as well as to long-term storage.

Glass libraries

Microsoft is currently developing a glass library where glass plates can be stored and retrieved using an ingenious system with robots. (4) Picture this as a huge bookcase in which the glass plates are neatly tucked away, comparable to how you line up books on a shelf. A rail runs alongside the bookcases on which the robots move. They can reach up and down to retrieve a glass plate and take it to a microscope, where the information is read out. After that, the glass plate is put back exactly where it came from. You can watch a video on the Microsoft website that shows you exactly how the system works, step by step. (5)

Ecologically sustainable

When we consider glass from the point of view of both digital and ecological sustainability, it appears to be the most promising form of storage for large amounts of data in the near future. The only drawback at present is that the infrastructure will need to be created or modified to enable this form of storage.

A major advantage is that the glass plates in the ‘bookshelf’ do not consume any energy, except when being transported around by the robots. As a result, the power consumption is vastly lower than that of current data centres.

Additionally, quartz is a very eco-friendly material. It is the second-most frequently found mineral on earth, easy to source locally and easy to mine. This makes production relatively cheap and strongly reduces the environmental burden by doing away with long-distance haulage between the mining site and production site.

Finally, quartz is a highly durable material. It isn’t easily damaged and can resist all sorts of external influences that would permanently damage other storage data. And if, for some reason, a glass plate no longer needs to be stored, then the material is easy to recycle. Taking into account all the reasons discussed above, data storage on glass for now seems to be the most ecologically friendly option to choose from.

Sources

(1) More information about Project Silica is available on the Microsoft research page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/

(2) The Verge, ‘Five-dimensional’ glass discs can store data for up to 13.8 billion years’, published on 16 February 2016.

(3) Microsoft, ‘Project Silica proof of concept stores Warner Bros. Superman movie on glass’, last viewed on 1 November 2023.

(4) Microsoft Research, ‘Research Talk: Storing data for millennia’ YouTube video, last viewed on 1 November 2023.

(5) Microsoft ‘Project Silica Library 2022’, YouTube video, last viewed on 1 November 2023.