SPhotonix Advances Next-Gen Glass Storage Technology

SPhotonix develops 5D glass storage to a commercial level with ambitious research and development and industry strategies.

SPhotonix is a large player in the next-generation storage technology, showing a tremendous advancement in its 5D glass storage platform. The company reckons that it will take an extra three to four years in the process of developing the solution commercially. Its modern prototypes hold up to 360 terabytes on a 5-inch silica glass platter with a claim of 13.8 billion years as far as their durability is concerned.

The current read and write speed, even with its impressive level of density, is still a bottleneck, so this storage technology is still used in archives. SPhotonix has already boasted 4 MB/s write speeds and 30 Mbps read speeds, which is miles away in performance compared to such things as tape and HDD. The company, however, plans to achieve 500 Mbps throughput with further development; thus, it could be competitive in enterprise backup environments.

Ilya Kazansky, a co-founder, described the strategy of licensing technology rather than producing hardware as an integrated approach, drawing inspiration from examples such as Arm and NVIDIA. SPhotonix plans to establish an industry partner alliance to commercially roll out this storage technology to the data centers and not the consumers because early read costs ($6,000) and write costs ($30,000) are very expensive.

With a proven success, 5D glass storage will have an incredible impact on archival storage technology, given that 5D glass storage breaks the boundaries of AI-led data demand and offers a capacity of tremendous size and incredible durability to an enterprise setting.