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"Working with a microscope": The data storage revolution



/ photo grover_net CC

In one of our previous materials, we wrote about a new development in the field of data storage. We, as an IaaS provider, are very interested in technologies that can change our understanding of data centers. Therefore, we decided to devote a little more time to data warehouses. Very capacious data storage.

In 2014, Seagate announced its new Kinetic HDD disk drive with an Ethernet interface, the performance of which is several times higher than that of all the company's existing products. The new invention simplifies the process of creating software and hardware data storage architectures, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) and allowing you to quickly respond to the growing needs of cloud storage infrastructure.
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Each Kinetic HDD drive has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, each with its own IP address, and the Kinetic Open Storage platform allows applications and hosts to communicate with each other directly via hard drives using TCP / IP data center infrastructure using an open API. Such technology can seriously transform the infrastructure of data centers and the IT industry as a whole.

Another development of Seagate, the essence of which is tiled recording technology (shingled magnetic recording, SMR), formed the basis of more than four million drives that were put on the market two years after its launch into production. The peculiarity of SMR technology is that when recording information on a disc, the tracks overlap each other.

This allows you to increase the number of tracks on each plate and reduce the distance between them, which in turn leads to an increase in disk capacity by 25%. The problem of low write speed in this case is solved with the help of special firmware that optimizes sequential write operations.

All this leads us to the idea that hard drives will stay with us for a long time, because it is, although not without flaws, a time-tested technology that continues to improve to this day. However, sooner or later, a new way of storing data will appear in the world, which in all respects will surpass magnetic disk drives. Let's take a little excursion into the future and take a look at promising developments in the field of data storage.

DNA based storage

One of the most promising and promising technologies of the future is DNA-based storage . We wrote about it in one of our previous posts . A DNA molecule offers an incredible recording density. A teaspoon size DNA disk can fit all the data that exists in the world — every song, every book, every video.

Another advantage of DNA repositories is their longevity. According to Harvard scientist George Church (George Church), a DNA disk can be left anywhere, even in the desert, but the data will remain on it even 400,000 years later.

To test how long data can be stored in DNA, scientists coded 83 kilobytes of data, namely two documents — the Federated Charter of 1291 and the Archimedes palimpsest. The choice of these documents, in their opinion, shows not only the potential applicability of the method, but also its historical importance. According to the New Scientist resource, the cost of the experiment was $ 1,500. According to representatives of ETH Zurich, if the DNA is frozen, this data will remain unchanged for a million years.

At this stage, the main obstacles to the massive introduction of new information storage technology is the time spent on data retrieval. Even using modern decryption technology, reading a DNA molecule takes many hours — several orders of magnitude more than reading a regular file on a computer. Because this type of storage is not suitable for frequently used data. Moreover, scientists still enter information into artificial DNA and only then place it in a bacterium.

Of course, at the current level of technology development, DNA synthesis is too expensive, but the prospects for its use for the long-term storage of important information are obvious.

It is also worth noting one of the related developments, which allows you to store data in the so-called "soft substances". The term “soft substance” can refer to liquids, polymers and even biomaterials. According to a new study, microscopic particles in a liquid can be used to encode the same zeros and ones, just like in modern hard drives. In theory, clusters of such particles can once store up to 1 TB of data in a tablespoon of liquid.

"Atomic" data collector

“What if we could arrange atoms in a random order?” Asked the famous American physicist Richard Feynman during his lecture “Down there is still a lot of space” in 1959. The scientist suggested that the "manipulator" of the appropriate size will allow to move individual atoms. This would mean that information, such as text, could be written using the atoms themselves, and then the entire Britannica encyclopedia would fit on the tip of the pin. Thus, Feynman laid the future foundations of nanotechnology.

Three decades later, a group of scientists from IBM was able to do what Feynman described. Using a tunneling microscope, they laid out a company logo of 35 xenon atoms on a nickel surface, demonstrating for the first time the ability to move individual atoms.

To prevent the displacement of atoms and keep them in their places, the researchers had to reduce the temperature to -269ÂşC, which is only 4ÂşC above absolute zero. The experiment was so costly that there was no point in writing more than three letters.

In July 2016, a team of scientists from the Delft University of Technology, located in the Netherlands, made a new breakthrough in data storage at the atomic level. Instead of three letters, they managed to write a whole paragraph of text (approximately 1 kilobyte of data).

The main disadvantage of the new method is high demands on external conditions. So that the atoms do not move arbitrarily, the drive must be cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen (minus 196 degrees Celsius). However, this method is much cheaper than liquid helium cooling, used at one time by IBM.

Unlike IBM researchers, the Dutch scientists saved the information not in letters, but in binary code. The essence of the technology consists in placing chlorine atoms on a copper plate, where they naturally form a grid with square cells. Alternating atoms with empty spaces between them, as well as moving atoms across the plate to empty places, scientists get “patterns” that can be read - just like QR codes are read.

“Imagine tagging. Each bit consists of two positions on the surface of copper atoms and one chlorine atom, which we can move between these positions. If chlorine is located in the upper position, and the "hole" - under it, then this means a unit. The reverse location is zero, ” said project leader Sander Otte. The chlorine atoms are rather dense, which results in greater stability in the data encoding than in the IBM experiment.

The lattice was so stable that scientists were able to build 1016 atoms in a 96-by-126-nanometer area (by comparison, the human immunodeficiency virus takes 120 nm). Such information storage density allows you to fit 78 trillion bits per square centimeter - this is hundreds of times higher than the capabilities of modern hard drives.

Such a high density will allow in future to expand the capacity of the memory of phones, computers and data centers. But first, scientists need to adapt technology to work at room temperature. In addition, the speed of rewriting is still low - only 64 bits in 1-2 minutes. Dr. Otte believes that he could increase it to a million bits per second, but this is still a thousand times slower than modern HDDs.

Whatever it was, the idea of ​​creating such a drive is very promising, if we develop it in the right direction. It is noteworthy that Dr. Otte decided to record the first 160 words from Freynman’s famous lecture on his atomic storage. It turns out that he was right: we can really dispose of atoms as we please.

Quantum data warehouse

Quantum encryption has long been viewed as a prospect for the development of super-fast computers, which are based on qubits (quantum bit), and not traditional binary data. The fact is, because of its nature, the information capacity of a qubit is higher than the usual bit of binary logic, however, not the storage density of the data, but their security, is of the most interest.

Researchers from the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Germany presented their new development, which claims to be the repository of quantum memory of the future. For the first time, they managed to maintain the state of a quantum bit in a crystal of artificial diamond at room temperature for longer than one second. This discovery allows us to overcome the main obstacles to the creation of ultra-fast quantum computers.

Note that the previous record of storing quantum information at room temperature was only a few milliseconds. When reaching extremely low temperatures, this indicator can be significantly increased, but this approach is impractical if it is necessary to create computing devices for ordinary consumers.

The role of a qubit in the "diamond" memory is played by the carbon atom, more precisely, the carbon isotope atom C13. The nucleus of the isotope has a so-called nuclear spin, which generates a magnetic moment, thanks to which it behaves like a magnet oriented parallel (then the qubit value is equal to the conventional “one”) or perpendicular (then its value is equal to the conventional “zero”) magnetic field applied from outside.

Due to the effect of quantum superposition, the core can be in two states at the same time - “parallel” and “perpendicular”, which allows you to write more information to the set of such qubits than to the classical binary register.

However, all information exchange operations with such qubits occur not directly, but through the so-called nitrogen-vacant center, which, in fact, is the main invention of the researchers, which made it possible to extend the qubit lifetime to one second.

According to the statements of researchers, in the future, quantum data storage systems can provide the means of authentication (passport, identification) and secure payments (credit cards) that are as secure as possible from counterfeit and fraud. After all, if information is recorded in a quantum state, then it cannot be correctly read without knowing the original recording parameters (for example, the direction of polarization of light).

Any attempt to find out the state of a quantum system changes it, and blind cloning is fundamentally impossible. For these reasons, popular brute force attacks against quantum systems are useless.

So far, it is not necessary to rush to conclusions and declare that one of the described technologies will be able to enter the market. However, these developments will definitely contribute to the development of storage devices. In the meantime, we need to monitor technological progress and store data on hard drives. According to forecasts of the international consortium ASTC (Advanced Storage Technology Consortium), HDD capacity will grow to 100 terabytes by 2025. It seems that this is enough for some time.

PS Interesting materials on the topic from our blog on Habré:


PPS Additionally, we have prepared links to practical manuals if you have time to get acquainted with our IaaS provider 1cloud and explore its features:

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/306806/

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