Note: Unfortunately the research paper linked in the article is a dead/broken/wrong link. Perhaps the author will update it later.
From the limited coverage, it doesn’t sound like there’s an actual optical drive that utilizes this yet and that it’s just theoretical based on the properties of the material the researchers developed.
I’m not holding my breath, but I would absolutely love to be able to back up my storage system to a single optical disc (even if tens of TBs go unused).
If they could make a R/W version of that, holy crap.
I could see it easily replacing tape libraries as backup devices in data centers. Without the economies of scale like we saw with DVD-RW, I doubt I’d be able to afford one until they hit the secondhand market. It would also be interesting to see something like that integrated into storage appliances which would let you have something approaching an on-prem version of Amazon’s Glacier tier.