The cost of storage to the customer is a function of the access rate and the required storage capacity. As researchers, the cloud has given us a unique opportunity to go back to the drawing board and think about designing cloud-first technologies from the ground up.” Ant Rowstron, Distinguished Engineerįigure 1: The cloud storage landscape as it is today. At Microsoft Research, we set up the Optics for the Cloud program in collaboration with Microsoft Azure to look for new ways of exploiting optical components and technologies in combination with electronics as we seek to support the growth in cloud compute, storage, and networking. Looking forward, however, these advances are stalling. “The massive growth we see in the cloud today has been largely powered by advances in integrated electronics.
In optical storage specifically, researchers are especially interested in opportunities to meet the current and future storage demands of the cloud. AI is one of these intersecting areas that offers great potential in this space as it continues to make rapid advances in deep learning and beyond. We see a real opportunity to make an impact by bringing together optical physicists and engineers, with the expertise that Microsoft has in computer systems and artificial intelligence (AI). Microsoft Research is taking on these challenges head on in their Optics for the Cloud program, where researchers are investigating new ways to improve storage, compute, and networking by bringing together different areas of technical expertise to identify new applications for optics. In cloud storage, this provides opportunities for new storage devices with different features to both complement the existing storage technologies that we deploy today and to solve some of the challenges that the cloud has placed on storage. This is particularly interesting in storage since all current storage mediums were created during the pre-cloud era. This virtualization provides new opportunities to design and optimize technologies that are uniquely adapted for the cloud. In cloud data storage, for example, customers pay for storage capacity and access rate rather than for physical storage devices (see Figure 1). The cloud has also changed the way we think about compute and storage.
It is projected that around 125 zettabytes of data will be generated annually by 2024, and storing this in a cost-effective way is going to be a big challenge. Data storage has always been a key tenet of compute, and with the massive growth in cloud compute, the demand for cloud data storage has opened an avenue for both revisiting prior technologies and developing new ones.
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