This last week I was in Los Angeles attending the roll-out of the new Astraeus Cloud Storage service from Open Drives. However, I also learned about leading edge research into new forms of storage that we may be seeing over the next few years.
As media creators, we tend of think of storage as either spinning media or solid state drives. But, there is a lot more going on under the surface — revolving around optical storage and long-term digital preservation.
There are at least six startups working on new forms of optical storage. This is similar to the write-once/read-many format of DVDs, but very different form and far greater capacity. For example I saw a thin sheet – thinner than a piece of aluminum foil and about the size of a postage stamp – that held 1 TB of data stored and read by a laser. This was a ceramic-on-glass sheet from Cerabyte that contains tiny etchings that incorporated the US Constitution.
This technology, Ceramic Nano Memory, is currently in beta testing to address the density, performance and access paradigms as well as cost and sustainability demands of data centers, offering a scaling path to the yottabytes of capacity, with a life-span approaching 100 years.
There are other approaches from other companies that can provide higher capacity recording on optical media format and others that record on quartz crystals; think the storage crystals from the latest mission impossible movie.
These are examples of new efforts at finding ways to store data for the seriously longer term. Digital preservation is a hot button for all of us.
While none of these products are available right now, they indicate a continuing deep interest in finding ways to process data faster, increase capacity and preserve it longer. I’ll let you know as I learn more.
