Project Silica: sustainable cloud archival storage in glass

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.