2024/12/31 by Patrick Anderson, Erika Aranas, Youssef Assaf +54 · 1 voice
Computer Science · #Advanced Data Storage Technologies #Computer Graphics and Visualization Techniques #Cloud Data Security Solutions
paper · doi:10.1145/3708996
openalex publication_date 2024/12/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.