Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
For a long time I believed that tape was a dead medium, possibly due to personal grievances from my days running a disaster recovery program. Nothing ruins a DR run quite like a bad tape.
Pettiness aside, tape continues to be a thriving business, with the latest generation, LTO-9 storing 45TB of compressed data on a single tape. That’s pretty unrivaled in terms of cost and capacity for long term storage. But it does have some downsides in terms of write speed (400 MB/s), sequential retrieval, and a need to copy to fresh tape about once a decade.
What’s the alternative for long-term archival storage? Startup Cerabyte offers a solution that uses ceramic nano-layers on ultra-thin glass to store data using lasers to etch a matrix on each layer. Each matrix can be written in a single burst, writing 2M bits per pulse, achiving write speeds of about 100 MB/s on their prototype system.
Cerabyte believes they can scale that system to a capacity of 5 PB/rack at 500 MB/s in 2025, with future models hitting 30-60 PB per rack. The primary advantage of glass etching is its durability. Although the media is write-once, that’s fine for archive data, and Cerabyte estimates the durability to be 100+ years. Like tape, the ceramic medium requires no maintenance or power when not being accessed.
If this idea of glass and laser data storage sounds familiar, Microsoft has been working on Project Silica for several years now with nothing to show for it. The fact that Cerabyte has a working demo system puts them years ahead of Project Silica and primes them for investment.
With the explosion of data hitting the yottabyte range, having stable, cheap, long-term storage is becoming ever more necessary. Perhaps glass can finally kill tape, and I’ll be vindicated.