The problem

Over a third of all silent movies ever made no longer exist. Perhaps you've heard of the Universal Studios fire of 2008, when tens of thousands of master recordings of our greatest artists were lost. So the media industry tells us that the films, music, the content that they produce is the value of their companies. And they go to extreme lengths to try to maintain it. And yet the acknowledge, even with their best efforts, everything is slowly degrading over time. And we hear that from other industries too. Like the banking sector. They understand exactly how risky current storage can be, how everything has to be backed up on a systematic basis and the potential loss of critical data, thats enough to keep them up at night. On a more personal note, think of all the precious data that you carry around on your phone. All of that is just misshap away from being lost. The demand for long-term data storage is reaching unprecedented levels. By 2023, it's expected that over 100 zettabytes of data will be stored in the cloud. Operating at such scales requires a fundamental re-thinking of how we build large-scale storage systems, as well as the underlying storage technologies that underpin them. VoxelBase™ is going to change all that forever with a platter of silica, a bit of glass, that looks invisible to the human eye that we can store data inside.

It took the hard disk industry over 40 years to reach their platter capacity. And it took the optical disk industry over 25 years to reach the capacity that they're at today. We've been pusing on this technology for only three years and already, in this piece of glass we can store more data than you store in an optical disk. And we're only just at the beginning. A peice of glass like this can theoretically store hundreds of terrabytes of data. At VoxelBase™ we've been working hard on optimizing the cloud-scale storage industry using existing technology like hard disk drives and tape. But we've got to the stage where we just can't push it as far as we want, and that led us to go out and look for a new media.

The solution

Our search led us to glass and we discovered ways to write data using pulsed femtosecond lasers. These are lasers that are firing extremely short pulses of light into the piece of glass, and where that laser heated the glass, a small dot was created and that dot can store data. We call that dot a voxel.

The voxel

Think of the voxel as like an iceberg, it's got depth and it's got orientation and we're able to control both the orientation and the depth of the iceberg. And thats how we can store multiple bits in a single voxel. We just tought this was amazing, and we thougt, how can we tame this technology to provide a storage system that doesn't require us to keep copying data from one generation to the next?

The longevity

It turns out glass is remarkably resilient. You can boil a silica platter in water. You can scrub it in steel wool. You can subject it to electric magnetic pulses. You can even broil it at 260 degrees Celsius. The data, once it's written inside the platter, is going to survive all those things. It is truly one of the most resilient media that has ever been found. Once you store your data in this, the data is going to be there for 100, 1 000, even 10 000 years. And if you no longer want to keep your data, it's really simple: you can just melt it down and it becomes more glass.

Learn More: A video illustrating how the technology works