Project Silica: Towards Sustainable Cloud Archival Storage in Glass (Transactions on Storage)
- Patrick Anderson ,
- Erika B. Aranas ,
- Youssef Assaf ,
- Raphael Behrendt ,
- Richard Black ,
- Marco Caballero ,
- Pashmina Cameron ,
- Burcu Canakci ,
- Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou ,
- Rebekah Clarke ,
- James Clegg ,
- Daniel Cletheroe ,
- Bridgette Cooper ,
- Thales De Carvalho ,
- Tim Deegan ,
- Austin Donnelly ,
- Rokas Drevinskas ,
- Alexander Gaunt ,
- Christos Gkantsidis ,
- Ariel Gomez Diaz ,
- Istvan Haller ,
- Freddie Hong ,
- Teodora Ilieva ,
- Shashidhar Joshi ,
- Russell Joyce ,
- William Kunkel ,
- David Lara ,
- Sergey Legtchenko ,
- Fanglin Liu ,
- Bruno Magalhaes ,
- Alana Marzoev ,
- Marvin McNett ,
- Jayashree Mohan ,
- Michael Myrah ,
- Truong Nguyen ,
- Sebastian Nowozin ,
- Aaron Ogus ,
- Hiske Overweg ,
- Ant Rowstron ,
- Maneesh Sah ,
- Masaaki Sakakura ,
- Peter Scholtz ,
- Nina Schreiner ,
- Omer Sella ,
- Adam Smith ,
- Ioan Stefanovici ,
- David Sweeney ,
- Benn Thomsen ,
- Govert Verkes ,
- Phil Wainman ,
- Jonathan Westcott ,
- Luke Weston ,
- Charles Whittaker ,
- Pablo Wilke Berenguer ,
- Hugh Williams ,
- Thomas Winkler ,
- Stefan Winzeck
ACM Transactions on Storage | , Vol 21(1): pp. 1-31
Article no. 7
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.