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We're facing a real data dilemma.
We are creating a lot more than we can store.
What we do save is degraded with each passing generation.
And the networking technology that we rely on uses way too much power.
What if we could store every bit of
our data on a media that is virtually
indestructible that can scale in ways that use a lot less energy?
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>> That's the vision that's driving us at
Microsoft to radically rethink and
invent new disruptive technologies in three key areas:
storage, networking and compute.
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>> Over a third of all the silent movies
ever made no longer exist.
Perhaps, you've heard of the Universal Studios fire of 2008,
when tens of thousands of
master recordings of our greatest artists were lost.
So the media industry tell us that the films, music,
the content that they produce is the value of their companies.
And they go to extreme lengths to try to maintain it.
And yet, they acknowledge, even with their best efforts,
everything is slowly degrading over time.
And we hear that from other industries too.
Like the banking sector.
They understand exactly how risky current storage can be,
how everything has to be backed up on
a systematic basis and the potential loss of critical data,
that's enough to keep them up at night.
On a more personal note,
think of all the precious data that you carry around on your phone.
All of that is just a mishap away from being lost.
This is going to change all that forever.
This is a platter of silica.
Basically, it's a bit of
glass and it probably looks invisible to you.
But if you look at it very carefully,
you can see data that is stored inside it.
If you think of the hard disk drive industry,
it took them over 40 years to reach their platter capacity.
It took the optical disk industry over
25 years to reach the capacity that they're at today.
We've been pushing on this technology for
only three years and already, in this piece of glass
we can store more data than you store in an optical disk.
And we're only just at the beginning.
A piece of glass like this theoretically can
store hundreds of terabytes of data.
At Microsoft, we've been working hard at optimizing
our cloud-scale storage using
existing technologies like hard disk drives and like tape.
But we got to the stage where
we just can't push it as far as we want,
and that led us to go out and look for a new media.
Our search led us to Southampton University.
They were writing data into glass using pulsed femtosecond lasers.
These are lasers that are firing extremely short pulses of
light into the piece of
glass, and where that laser heated the glass,
a small dot was created and that dot can store data.
We call that a voxel.
Think of it like an iceberg,
it's got depth and it's got orientation and
we're able to control both the orientation
and the depth of the iceberg.
And that's how we can store multiple bits in a single voxel.
We just thought this was amazing, and we thought,
how can we tame this technology to provide a storage system
which doesn't require us to keep copying
data from one generation to the next?
It turns out that glass is remarkably resilient.
You can boil this in water.
You can scrub it with steel wool.
You can subject it to electric magnetic pulses.
You can even broil this at 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
The data, once it's written inside it,
is going to survive all those things.
It is truly one of
the most resilient media that has ever been found.
Once you store your data in this,
the date is going to be there for 100,
1,000, even 10,000 years.
And if you no longer want to keep your data, it's really simple:
you can just melt it down and it becomes more glass.
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>> We've just heard about data storage as
one of the challenges when we're thinking about the future.
The other one is sustainable networking.
It's about the energy and the speed with which we can
transfer data over the network to access that storage.
And in our team, we're working very hard and looking at
new optical technologies that we can
bring to bear on optical networking.
If you think of a traditional data center at the moment,
when you send some data,
it goes to a server in a rack to a top-of-rack switch.
That top-of-rack switch converts the data from
electrons to photons and sends it to another switch
where it's converted back, so
this can then decide where to send it next.
And this process is then repeated
millions of times across the datacenter.
That means we're wasting huge amounts
of energy doing these conversions.
So what we're hoping to do is allow you to
convert it just once and
then we're going to send it across the entire network as light.
One way to think about all this is to think of this prism.
If you shine sunlight into it,
it's going to split the sunlight up into different colors.
And this property is going to allow us to steer where the data goes.
But the challenge is to do that really fast.
When I say really fast,
I mean light-speed fast.
So we went all in to create an optical chip
that could switch between
the different light colors at the nanosecond range.
As for sustainability, every time we convert from photons to
electrons and electrons to photons, it takes energy.
So the great thing about this new optical networking
is that at the core it's completely passive.
All that happens is is that it steers beams have lights.
It requires no additional energy to do that.
We're trying to also incorporate it with
optical storage to create new types of
data centers that we can deploy in
the most arid or ice-bound regions,
out at sea or even underwater.
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>>Most recently at Microsoft,
we've been applying the same kind Of radical thinking to compute.
There are a lot of optical technologies like 4K and 8K cameras,
like SLMs which are basically screens.
They all becoming mainstream now,
and we're beginning to ask,
are the things that are being explored in the past that might
make sense now when we have these newer components?
One of the things that we're really interested in
doing is looking at whether we can create
new machine learning algorithms that can
be designed from the ground-up to
work with the kind of operations that you can
do easily in the optical compute world.
We're seeing a future where we can bring
all of these technologies together.
We're not there yet,
but every day we're making progress on that dream.
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>> If you think of all the things that we've lost to time,
the Library of Alexandria,
the Manuscripts of da Vinci,
irreplaceable writings and artistic masterpieces.
Imagine if we could promise for you to
store anything that's important to you.
Your e-mails, your documents, your photos – forever.
For me, on here I'm storing my wedding photos.
So my great, great, great, great,
great, great grandchildren can enjoy them.
It's really quite powerful to be able to
store your information forever.
It's going to change the way that we look at the past.
It's going to change the way that we collaborate in the future.
It is literally going to transform existence as we know it.
Now, how powerful is that?
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