We haven’t, but sadly the technology is locked to big tech.
Microsoft has demoed some cool technology where they store data in glass, Project Silica. Sadly, it seems unlikely this will ever be available to consumers. One neat aspect of the design is that writing data is significantly higher power than reading. So you can keep your writing devices physically separated from the readers and have no fear that malicious code could ever overwrite existing data plates.
Some blurbs
Project Silica is developing the world’s first storage technology designed and built from the media up to address humanity’s need for a long-term, sustainable storage technology. We store data in quartz glass: a low-cost, durable WORM media that is EMF-proof, and offers lifetimes of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. This has huge consequences for sustainability, as it means we can leave data in situ, and eliminate the costly cycle of periodically copying data to a new media generation.
We’re re-thinking how large-scale storage systems are built in order to fully exploit the properties of the glass media and create a sustainable and secure storage system to support archival storage for decades to come! We are co-designing the hardware and software stacks from scratch, from the media all the way up to the cloud user API. This includes a novel, low-power design for the media library that challenges what the robotics and mechanics of archival storage systems look like.
Why would they sell it directly? Works better if they can advertise their one of a kind, super stable, cloud specific data archival solution that nobody else can replicate. Or not even advertise it, but maintain lower storage costs per byte relative to AWS or Google.
As far as I know, the technology behind Amazon Glacier has never been shared. Glass disks could eventually be backing the Microsoft equivalent.
I doubt the decisions on the product came down along that logic.
Surely they could make more money by selling it in some form or another. If the economics actually gave them a storage cost advantage over AWS/GCP, then profitability must be possible.
In reality it's probably incredibly expensive, and the ROI could not be obtained without even further investment to drive the costs down.
>Why would they sell it directly? Works better if they can advertise their one of a kind, super stable, cloud specific data archival solution that nobody else can replicate.
Because network speeds aren't high enough to back up terabytes of data remotely on a regular basis. This would only work if you already store all your data with this vendor, which is probably a stupid move.
If network speeds aren't enough, there's Azure Data box, which is the equivalent to AWS Snowball, where they mail you a hard drive and you ship it back to them and they put it in their cloud.
Microsoft has demoed some cool technology where they store data in glass, Project Silica. Sadly, it seems unlikely this will ever be available to consumers. One neat aspect of the design is that writing data is significantly higher power than reading. So you can keep your writing devices physically separated from the readers and have no fear that malicious code could ever overwrite existing data plates.
Some blurbs
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...