Sustainable and cost-effective long-term storage remains an unsolved problem. The most widely used storage technologies today are magnetic (hard disk drives and tape). They use media that degrades over time and has a limited lifetime, which leads to inefficient, wasteful, and costly solutions for storing long-lived data. We are building Silica: the first cloud storage system for archival data underpinned by quartz glass, an extremely resilient media with virtually unlimited lifetime. Data is written using ultrafast laser nano-structuring in the bulk of the glass, creating permanent modifications to the media that allows data to be left in situ indefinitely. Designing and building a new storage technology solely for the cloud affords us with a tremendous opportunity to completely re-think how storage systems are built, free from the legacy constraints of existing technologies. In Silica, we are co-designing and co-optimizing the entire system from the media & write/read processes all the way up to the cloud service level with sustainability and low-cost as primary objectives. Our design follows a cloud-first, data-driven approach underpinned by principles derived from analysing a real public cloud archival service. Here we discuss how these principles have shaped the Silica technology down to the laser nano-structuring process, ushering in a new era of sustainable, cost-effective storage.
The demand for long-term data storage in the cloud grows continuously into the zettabytes. Operating at such scales requires a fundamental re-thinking of how we build large-scale storage systems to archive data in a sustainable and costeffective manner. In Project Silica, a storage technology for the cloud is being designed and developed from the media up by leveraging the recent progress in ultrafast laser nano-structuring of the transparent media. Together with the advances in reading, decoding and error correction processes, high-density and high-throughput multi-dimensional volumetric optical data writing is achieved, enabling successful end-to-end proof-of-concept demonstrations of the technology. With exceptional media longevity, this could transform archival cloud storage. Here we briefly discuss the development of the technology, key metrics for cost-efficient optical data storage at scale, and successful proof-ofconcept demonstrations.
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