Project Silica: Towards 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 long-lived data. This article 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 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 design follows a cloud-first, data-driven methodology underpinned by principles derived from analyzing the archival workload of a large public cloud service. Silica can support a wide range of archival storage workloads and ushers in a new era of sustainable, cost-effective storage.
Authors
- Sebastian Nowozin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0347-0852)
- Daniel Cletheroe (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-6444-9149)
- Benn C. Thomsen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1092-3936)
- Ariel Gomez Diaz (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1292-1507)
- Jayashree Mohan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-5260-3203)
- Phil Wainman (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-3670-3499)
- Richard Black (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-7032-8458)
- Hugh Williams
- Govert Verkes (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8901-4789)
- W. Minster Kunkel (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1061-4810)
- Alexander L. Gaunt (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6123-288X)
- Stefan Winzeck (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9170-2750)
- Bridgette Cooper (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4679-3240)
- Austin Donnelly (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-3579-4414)
- Rokas Drevinskas (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0130-0454)
- Alana Marzoev (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1368-5031)
- Masaaki Sakakura (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-2612-9802)
- Luke Weston (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-7335-2664)
- Hiske Overweg (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9107-4763)
- Rebekah Storan Clarke (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-0185-7821)
- Christos Gkantsidis (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6898-2368)
- Marco Caballero (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3447-5891)
- Charles Whittaker (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6105-4315)
- Burcu Canakci (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8406-7768)
- Antony Rowstron (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-5936-6895)
- Ioan Stefanovici (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-2347-2715)
- Sergey Legtchenko (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-5596-8962)
- Aaron Ogus (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-6667-736X)
- Pablo Wilke Berenguer (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8624-576X)
- Youssef Assaf (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5865-3854)
- Tim Deegan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0398-969X)
- Nina Schreiner (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-5892-3733)
- Bruno Magalhaes (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8041-0282)
- Adam Smith (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7931-1982)
- Patrick Anderson (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-5918-3717)
- Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5073-1193)
- Pashmina Cameron (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-0444-1755)
- Omer Sella (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2795-8580)
- David Sweeney (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1739-3950)
- James Clegg (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-3428-7161)
- Erika Aranas
- Russell Joyce (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6773-3837)
- P. Scholtz (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-9998-969X)
- R. Behrendt (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-3954-8071)
- Freddie Hong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6318-9723)
- Teodora Ilieva (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3791-647X)
- Fanglin Linda Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4498-5668)
- Shashidhar Joshi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-5513-6080)
- Marvin McNett (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-0997-7672)
- Istvan Haller (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-8259-4884)
- Michael Myrah (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-6907-0408)
- Maneesh Sah (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-5851-940X)
- Thales De Carvalho (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-6345-4946)
- David Lara (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-4964-8381)
- Jonathan Westcott (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-3443-5764)
- Truong Nguyen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-7111-4417)
- Thomas Winkler (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3097-0230)
Institutions
- Microsoft (United States) (US)
- Microsoft Research (United Kingdom) (GB)
Publication Details
- Journal
- ACM Transactions on Storage
- Published
- 2024-12-31
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3708996
- Citations
- 6
- Primary Topic
- Advanced Data Storage Technologies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 2.09