As the world moves headlong into the digital age, the importance of storing, managing, and protecting digital information is becoming more important than ever. The question is: how long can our digital information be kept? Companies now consider digital information as a form of wealth – information must not only be secured from hackers, but it must survive the ravages of time.
Some current advanced storage technology includes cloud-to-cloud backup, high-capacity flash drives, containers, NVMe, 32-Gig FC, and software-defined storage. Intel Storage Technology products and services are now being used to replace legacy storage solutions. And the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) – a great resource – is working to advance storage and information technology solutions. See the SNIA website for videos, webcasts, blog posts, and white papers. SNIA members include Cisco, DDN Storage, Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Microsoft, Huawei, Lenovo, and others.
New 5D Storage Technology Lasts Forever
According to the University of Southampton, “scientists at the Southampton University have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years. Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.”
A femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second. Information is written to quartz instead of plastic typically used for CD-ROMs. CD-ROM information is coded in plastic on bumps of a certain length, width, and height, but the new 5D storage technology uses self-assembling nanostructures. For more on how this is done, see the video below.
The following video explains 5D Storage.
