In a big tech breakthrough, Microsoft achieved the insurmountable of the task of storing the digital data of the full-length movie in a single piece of glass.
Microsoft successfully archives Warner Bros. 'Superman' movie on a piece of glass.
The idea is to provide a cheaper, superior quality alternative for preserving digital content in the long-term which is the problem with the existing digital technologies.
Project Silica's application of turning digital data into physical artifacts is what piqued the interest of Warner Bros., which currently uses reels of film in temperature and humidity-controlled cold storage vaults to preserve its iconic and vast library of movies and TV shows. It also has its own digital archives that are subject to content migration every three years to avoid any degradation issues.
The company had been in search of a long-term storage solution for archiving its assets, one that offers to store "cold" data — archival data that may have tremendous value or that companies are required to maintain — but that doesn’t need to be frequently accessed.
Project Silica researcher Youssef Assaf is engaged in the durability test of the silica glass in a kettle of boiling water
Unlike the company's current storage methods that require continuous maintenance and monitoring due to their fragility, the glass quartz used in Project Silica proved to be quite durable after it was baked, boiled, microwaved, flooded, demagnetized and scourged with steel wool but reported no loss of data.
Its deployment in large-scale data centers could potentially lower the environmental footprint of such facilities as they won't need energy-intensive air conditioning or other systems to maintain air quality.
Eventually, this is not intended for the individual users who store the movies and play from their homes. This is for the enterprises.
Using silica glass instead of film reels for archiving is also said to bring qualitative improvements to data. It will retain the original pixel quality as it is. And using a medium like silica glass enables data to be read back exactly like when it came out of the camera, preserving original pixels in the best possible manner. Combine it with the high costs of creating archival film negatives for all digitally shot TV content, Project Silica could potentially become a cheaper, higher-quality replacement for creating physical archives.
Contrary to pits and lands created on the surface of optical discs, Project Silica involves burning "voxels" into the glass in a 3D array to allow for a high storage density, where a 2 mm thick piece of glass can contain over 100 layers of voxels that physically deform the glass through laser pulses.
The encoded data is also read faster as compared to spooling tape storage as algorithms can quickly pinpoint anywhere within the glass, potentially reducing lag time for retrieving the required information.
Project Silica Team:
The Project Silica Team at Microsoft Research Cambridge
If Project Silica’s storage solution proves to be as cost-effective and as scalable as it could be, this will drastically alter the way we store a huge amount of data in the future.
Compiled by
Srini
Reference Source: Techspot.com