Project Silica: The Future of Sustainable Archival Data Storage

Sustainable and cost-effective long-term storage remains an unsolved problem. The most widely used enterprise 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 talk 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 place 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. This design follows a cloud-first, data-driven methodology underpinned by principles derived from analysing 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.