Project HSD: Holographic Storage Device for the Cloud

The enormous growth in demand for cloud storage has highlighted the need to rethink our storage systems from the media up. NAND flash and spinning hard disk drives are the mainstays of today’s warm cloud storage but are no longer improving capacity exponentially; in addition they face  reliability and performance challenges due to the mechanical moving parts in hard disk drives and the declining endurance of flash cells.

Project HSD is a collaboration between Microsoft Research Cambridge and Microsoft Azure to re-imagine an old idea – holographic storage – as a cloud-first design. We are capitalizing on the recent exponential improvement and commoditization in optical technologies such as smartphone cameras, as well as the unique opportunity to design at cloud scale.

Our interdisciplinary team comprises experts in physics, optics, machine learning, and storage systems; and our mission is to design mechanical-movement free, high-endurance cloud storage that is both performant and cost-effective. This has led to new research challenges and breakthroughs in areas ranging from materials to machine learning.

Project HSD was publicly announced at Ignite 2020 by Mark Russinovich, CTO of Azure. See Mark talk about HSD and show a demo of it (watch from 1h25 to 1h30) and read the related blog post for more details on HSD.

Project HSD is part of the broader Optics for the Cloud group at MSR Cambridge, which explores the future of cloud infrastructure at the intersection of optics and computer science.