In search for future of cloud storage, researchers look to holographic storage solutions
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. 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.
The cloud has also changed the way we think about compute and storage. In the cloud, services are virtualized. In cloud data storage, for example, customers pay for storage capacity and access rate rather than for physical storage devices (see Figure 1). This virtualization provides new opportunities to design and optimize technologies that are uniquely adapted for the cloud. This is particularly interesting in storage since all current storage mediums were created during the pre-cloud era. 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.
Microsoft Research is taking on these challenges head on in their Optics for the Cloud