RA: "Project Silica is indeed an exciting initiative on using femtosecond lasers with quartz glass for long-term data storage. Both our work and project silica have similar goals – designing a new building block for the exascale cold-data storage needs of cloud vendors in the near future. Which media technology, DNA or glass, will ultimately come to fruition is difficult to answer at this point as neither are cost competitive with tape today, and both require several years of research before they can be deployed in practice."