MICROSOFT ARCHIVER MOVIE
MICROSOFT ARCHIVER ARCHIVE

It's not trying to provide consumers with new ways to run their personal computers or watch movies at home. Microsoft's Project Silica team focuses solely on building storage for archiving data at cloud scale. Quartz glass is also plentiful and relatively inexpensive compared to other media, making it well suited to store great amounts of cold data indefinitely.

It avoids the costly cycles of rewriting data to next-generation storage media. Quartz glass does not require expensive environmental management such as temperature and humidity controls, and it can retain data for thousands of years without experiencing bit rot. They've baked it, boiled it, microwaved it, demagnetized it and scoured it with steel wool, and after all that, they were still able to read the data. Project Silica researchers have set their sights on silica glass because of its durability. To carry out this project, Microsoft partnered with the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton, where scientists already proved the ability to use laser-writing technologies to store data in glass. Most of the work on Project Silica occurs at Microsoft Research's Cambridge lab in the U.K., where a team of physicists, electrical engineers, optics experts and researchers with storage backgrounds are building a completely new type of storage system. Project Silica is part of the broader Optics for the Cloud project, a Microsoft program to advance the adoption of optical technologies in the cloud. It explores whether quartz glass can serve as a practical medium to store cold data in the cloud for long periods of time and replace the other media altogether. This is where Microsoft Project Silica comes in. Many believe the time has come to create new systems designed from the ground up specifically for the cloud. The cloud requires a reassessment of large-scale storage systems and what it will take to meet the challenges ahead. No storage technology was built specifically to store cold data at cloud scale. Each one was created before the cloud existed and was designed to support multiple uses.

MICROSOFT ARCHIVER ARCHIVE

However, none of these are cost-effective platforms to handle the vast amounts of archive data that will live in the cloud.

Most cold data is currently stored on magnetic tape, optical disks, HDDs and, to a lesser degree, SSDs. Today's storage technologies will soon reach their practical limits as demand for long-term cloud storage continues to grow to unprecedented levels. It provides a storage medium that can potentially last thousands of years without degradation. Microsoft Project Silica uses ultrafast laser optics to store the data, as well as microscopy and artificial intelligence to read the data.

MICROSOFT ARCHIVER MOVIE

A digital version of the movie was stored in the glass as the first proof of concept for Project Silica, a Microsoft Research project that develops advanced archival storage technology, specifically for the cloud.

Microsoft archiver