This week, Microsoft and Warner Bros, signed an agreement to develop a new type of storage. This new kind of storage unveiled with a full copy of the original Superman movie 1978 in a glass device with the following dimensions (75 x 75 x 2 mm).
In the 1978 Superman movie, the hero accesses messages left by his father stored in crystals stored in the Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. Perhaps that is why Microsoft, in association with Warner Bros, chose this movie to demonstrate a new storage technology called »Silica Project», a reference to the raw material of glass.
This glass device it is made of ordinary quartz and contains 75,6 GB of data. Microsoft has revealed that it has been boiled, cooked and scraped to test its strength. The research project, Project Silica, is designed for data storage and preservation.
The division of the Microsoft firm specializing in computer research, also known as Microsoft Research is at the heart of this "new cold storage device" made of glass which is part of a large investment by the group for the development of a storage technology that in the future could be integrated into its Azure platform.
The company explained that they used infrared lasers to encode data. in "voxels«, A three-dimensional equivalent of the pixels on our usual screens. The data is stored in the glass and machine learning algorithms can decode the patterns to read the data.
Microsoft is still developing this technology and has recently published new work research about the Silica project. For now, the process developed by Microsoft is expensive and complex. However, the company's researchers are trying to speed it up and reduce the costs involved.
"Storing the entire 'Superman' film in glass and being able to read it successfully is an important milestone," Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure's chief technology officer, said in a statement. "I'm not saying that all the questions have been fully answered, but it seems that we are now in a phase where we are working on refinement and experimentation, rather than asking the question 'can we do it?'"
Vicky Colf, Chief Technology Officer, Warner Bros He said about the technology:
"If it works for us, we strongly believe it will be to the advantage of anyone who wants to preserve and archive content."
It's been a storage challenge for decades. Photos fade over time, books rot, and even CDs and hard drives are not the best places to store our digital memories. Research has tried to address this problem for at least five years And Microsoft is certainly not the first to develop glass disk storage.
Previous studies have shown that storage in glass offers interesting storage properties with thermal stability up to 1000 ° C, a practically unlimited life at a certain temperature (13.8 billion years at 190 ° C) and up to 360 TB / disk.
As a very stable and secure form of portable memory, lhe technology could be very useful for organizations with large files, such as national archives, museums and libraries, to store your information and archives. The technology was first experimentally demonstrated in 2013 when a digital copy of a 300 kb text file was successfully recorded in 5D.
Microsoft's strong support for this technology means companies could get serious about this new storage process for their most complex needs.
It should be noted that, as part of its strategy to permanently store its digital assets and maintain the digital content it produces, the entertainment company Warner Bros is currently creating multiple copies of these works for archival, some of them by converting a digital copy to analog film and dividing it into three color components to transfer each to black and white negatives that do not fade like color films.
Yes sir! Nothing safer than keeping irreplaceable information ... on a glass plate.