The academic paper (which is 16 papers) was presented at the 29th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles and highlights the principles for the organization's future plans in building a robust, long-lasting, and highly effective storage system.
What is Project Silica?
Talking about Project Silica, Microsoft said "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 long-lived data.
The storage units, made of quartz glass, will be ready for usage in the cloud, meaning that Azure users will be the first to gain, and possibly the only ones who will benefit for the foreseeable future as the technology matures.
Project Silica has been in the works for years, with Microsoft teasing a prototype as early as 2019. It has since continued to build on its work in preparation for producing a system that operates in a strikingly similar manner to the ceramics-based storage that Cerabyte is developing.
Glass-based storage: How does it work?
"This paper presents Silica: the first cloud storage system for archival data underpinned by quartz glass, an extremely resilient media that allows data to be left in situ indefinitely," the researchers noted in their report.
"The hardware and software of Silica have been co-designed and co-optimized from the media up to the service level with sustainability as a primary objective."
The science behind it
Data is written in voxels on a square glass platter using ultrafast femtosecond lasers. These are irreversible modifications to the physical structure of the glass which permit numerous bits of data to be encoded in layers over the glass's surface. These layers are then layered in hundreds vertically.
They use polarization microscopy technology to picture the platter before reading data, and the read drive scans sectors in a Z-pattern. The photos are then analyzed and decoded using a machine-learning model to transform analogue signals into digital data.
Because of the secure nature of archival glass storage, the medium is appropriate for various sensitive industries, including financing, scientific research, and medical care, implying that firms in these areas may be able to resist ransomware cyberattacks attacking data stored on the cloud.
In light of Azure cloud storage consumption patterns, Microsoft is now investigating how to configure best the physical library in which the glass is stored.
Read 29th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles to know more!