Project Silica: sustainable cloud archival storage in glass

Ioan Stefanovici; Patrick Anderson; Erika Blancada Aranas; Richard Black; Marco Caballero; Burcu Canakci; Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou; James Clegg; Daniel Cletheroe; Bridgette Cooper; Tim Deegan; Austin Donnelly; Rokas Drevinskas; Ariel Gomez Diaz; Teodora Ilieva; Russell Joyce; Sergey Legtchenko; Bruno Magalhaes; Antony Rowstron; Masaaki Sakakura; Nina Schreiner; David Sweeney; Charles Whittaker; Hugh Williams; Thomas Winkler; Stefan Winzeck

doi:10.1117/12.3010515

12 March 2024 Project Silica: sustainable cloud archival storage in glass

Ioan Stefanovici, Patrick Anderson, Erika Blancada Aranas, Richard Black, Marco Caballero, Burcu Canakci, Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou, James Clegg, Daniel Cletheroe, Bridgette Cooper, Tim Deegan, Austin Donnelly, Rokas Drevinskas, Ariel Gomez Diaz, Teodora Ilieva, Russell Joyce, Sergey Legtchenko, Bruno Magalhaes, Antony Rowstron, Masaaki Sakakura, Nina Schreiner, David Sweeney, Charles Whittaker, Hugh Williams, Thomas Winkler, Stefan Winzeck

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 12875, Frontiers in Ultrafast Optics: Biomedical, Scientific, and Industrial Applications XXIV; 128750H (2024) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3010515
Event: SPIE LASE, 2024, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

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.

Conference Presentation

(2024) Published by SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Citation Download Citation

Ioan Stefanovici, Patrick Anderson, Erika Blancada Aranas, Richard Black, Marco Caballero, Burcu Canakci, Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou, James Clegg, Daniel Cletheroe, Bridgette Cooper, Tim Deegan, Austin Donnelly, Rokas Drevinskas, Ariel Gomez Diaz, Teodora Ilieva, Russell Joyce, Sergey Legtchenko, Bruno Magalhaes, Antony Rowstron, Masaaki Sakakura, Nina Schreiner, David Sweeney, Charles Whittaker, Hugh Williams, Thomas Winkler, and Stefan Winzeck "Project Silica: sustainable cloud archival storage in glass", Proc. SPIE 12875, Frontiers in Ultrafast Optics: Biomedical, Scientific, and Industrial Applications XXIV, 128750H (12 March 2024); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3010515

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