Microsoft inches closer to glass storage breakthrough that could finally make ransomware attacks impossible in the data center and hyperscalers — but only Azure customers will benefit from it
Microsoft has released a paper on the long-awaited glass-based storage technology it supports, replacing the conventional technology used in the best hard drives And best SSDs there today.
The Academic article of 16 pagespresented at the 29th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, outlines the principles behind the company's plans to build sustainable and highly efficient storage systems.
The storage units are made of quartz glass and will be cloud-ready – meaning Azure customers will be the first to benefit, and likely the only ones to benefit, while the technology is still embryonic in nature.
Project Silica has been in the works for years – with Microsoft make a prototype back in 2019. Since then, it has expanded its work before designing a system that works in a remarkably similar way to the ceramic-based storage that Cerabyte Is building.
How does glass-based storage work?
“This paper presents Silica: the first cloud storage system for archival data backed by quartz glass, an extremely resilient medium that allows data to remain in situ indefinitely,” the authors wrote.
“Silica's hardware and software are co-designed and optimized from the media to the service level with sustainability as a primary goal.”
Data is written onto a square glass dish with ultrafast femtosecond lasers via voxels. These are permanent changes to the physical structure of the glass, allowing multiple bits of data to be written in layers across the glass surface. These layers are then stacked vertically by the hundreds.
To read data, they use polarization microscopy technology to image the dish while the read disk scans sectors in a Z pattern. The images are then sent to be processed and decoded, which relies on a machine learning model to convert analog signals into digital data.
The medium is suitable for a variety of sensitive sectors, including finance, scientific research and healthcare, due to the secure nature of archival glass storage. This means that organizations in these sectors may be able to withstand ransomware attacks that target data stored in the cloud.
Microsoft is currently investigating how best to configure the physical library where the Glass is stored, in light of Azure cloud storage usage patterns.