Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA), with its ultra-high storage density and long durability, is a promising long-term archival storage medium and is attracting much attention today. A DNA storage system encodes and stores digital data with synthetic DNA sequences and decodes DNA sequences back to digital data via sequencing. Many encoding schemes have been proposed to enlarge DNA storage capacity by increasing DNA encoding density. However, only increasing encoding density is insufficient because enhancing DNA storage capacity is a multifaceted problem.

Data storage capacity is projected to reach 2.5 Yottabytes by 2050. Historically, the amount of installed data storage has increased by three orders of magnitude approximately every 30 years: from exceeding 1 Exabyte in 1980 to 1 Zettabyte in 2012, and now to exceed 1 Yottabyte anticipated in the mid-2040s. To meet the demand within the next decade, data storage supply must grow over 100-fold—not only in capacity but also in cost efficiency, performance, and media longevity. Furthermore, energy efficiency must improve even more significantly.

The Global Storage market is growing at a CAGR of 17.8% (Ref: Fortune Business Insights). While current storage technologies are still satisfying the current capacity needs, the explosive growth in the digitization of information has warranted research and analysis into new futuristic media, such as molecular/DNA storage, that can scale to large capacity with much lower carbon impact.

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Software Defined Storage (SDS) frameworks offer storage services that provide high availability, durability and reliability guarantees. However, these guarantees come at a performance cost. While drives can offer microsecond latency and throughput of millions of IOPs, SDS services typically offer millisecond access latencies with 10-100K IOPs throughput.

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Cloud customers need a range of storage types to use as the durable layer of their systems. For example, some customers want a Blob interface, some want to use files, and others want disks. Cloud providers must offer all of these and more options, while continuing to innovate and reduce costs. Creating separate systems for each product offering is inefficient. Trying to build all product offerings on one system is ineffective.

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