Holographic Storage is an old idea that has always promised high density and fast random access, but has never been commercially competitive with Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and Solid State Devices (SSDs). In Project HSD at Microsoft Research we asked the question: “Does holographic storage finally make sense for cloud storage?” This paper describes our journey towards answering this question. We achieved 1.8x higher density than the previous state of the art, using commodity components available today and leveraging machine learning to compensate for the noise and distortions introduced by commodity components. This uncovered two new challenges which are the focus of this paper: achieving high end-to-end energy efficiency without sacrificing capacity, and spatial multiplexing without mechanical movement. Improving end-to-end energy efficiency requires joint optimization across low-level media parameters and higher-level system parameters that govern background maintenance operations such as read refresh and garbage collection. We developed new physics models of the media; analytic and simulation models of the media access and background media maintenance; and workload-driven optimization to find optimal parameter combinations. These techniques resulted in a 14x improvement over the previous approach for typical workloads without sacrificing capacity. We also designed the first scalable and mechanical movement free spatial multiplexing system for holographic storage. Despite these advances, we conclude that currently holographic storage is still far from the combination of density, capacity scaling, and energy efficiency needed to compete with the incumbent technologies. We need fundamental advances in the physical media that improve energy efficiency by another 1–2 orders of magnitude without reducing data density. Further advances in optics are also required to achieve spatial multiplexing that is simultaneously scalable, low-loss, and high-density.

Nathanaël Cheriere

Jiaqi Chu

Grace Brennan

Pashmina Cameron

Pedro Da Costa

Jannes Gladrow

Guilherme Ilunga

Douglas Kelly

Sarah Lewis

Joowon Lim

Giorgio Maltese

Tony Mason

Greg O'Shea

Soujanya Ponnapalli

Michael Rudow

Alan Sanders

Theano Stavrinos

Xingbo Wu

Mengyang Yang

Dushyanth Narayanan

Benn Thomsen

Antony Rowstron

ACM Transactions on Storage

ACM TRANSACTIONS ON STORAGE (TOS) 是一本新期刊，旨在发表存储领域和密切相关学科的原始档案论文。出现在 TOS 中的文章将倾向于呈现新技术和概念，或者报告新的经验和实际系统的实验。存储是一个广泛的多学科领域，包括网络协议、资源管理、数据备份、复制、恢复、设备、安全性以及数据编码、密度和低功耗理论。这些领域之间的潜在协同作用有望开辟新的研究方向。

ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS) is an emerging academic journal dedicated to publishing original research papers in the field of storage and closely related disciplines. Articles published in TOS tend to present new technologies and concepts or report on new experiences and experimental results from practical systems. Storage is a broad multidisciplinary field that includes network protocols, resource management, data backup, replication, recovery, device security, as well as data encoding, density, and low-power theories. The potential synergies among these areas are expected to open up new research directions.

《ACM Transactions on Storage》（TOS）是一本新兴的学术期刊，专注于发表存储领域及其相关学科的原创研究论文。TOS刊登的文章通常展示新技术和概念，或报告新的经验和实际系统的实验结果。存储是一个广泛的多学科领域，涵盖网络协议、资源管理、数据备份、复制、恢复、设备安全性，以及数据编码、密度和低功耗理论等方面。这些领域之间的潜在协同作用有望开辟新的研究方向。

Holographic Storage for the Cloud: advances and challenges

全息云存储：进展与挑战

Category	Quartile
计算机科学	3
计算机科学, 计算机硬件	3
计算机科学, 计算机软件工程	3

Holographic Storage for the Cloud: advances and challenges

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Journal Info

Category	Quartile
COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING	2