

Ant Rowstron
Distinguished Engineer / Deputy Lab Director
About
Please visit my external current homepage: here.
If you are looking for a publication please look here: publication list or on Google Scholar.
I am a Distinguished Engineer and Deputy Lab Director at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, and I lead a team looking at future technologies for the cloud. Many of the projects we run in the team are focused on creating and exploring new optical-based technologies for the cloud across storage, networking and compute (for more information see #OpticsForTheCloud). Examples of the sort of projects the lab does are Project Silica, which is looking at how to store data in Fused Silica (basically glass) as a replacement for tape for long term archival storage and Project HSD that is looking into how holographic storage can be used in the cloud.
I am a systems researcher who has spent most of my career working at the intersection…
Microsoft Research Podcast

Optics for the cloud: storage in the zettabyte era with Dr. Ant Rowstron and Mark Russinovich
Episode 97 | November 6, 2019 - Remember when a hard drive that could hold a terabyte of data was a big deal? Well, we’re now in an era where peta-, exa- and even zetta-bytes are the bytes of the day, and it turns out it’s hard to fit that many zeroes on a hard drive. That’s where Dr. Ant Rowstron, Deputy Lab Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, and Mark Russinovich, Chief Technical Officer of Azure, come in. Their respective teams are working on paradigm-breaking solutions to give us phenomenal storage power in an itty-bitty living space.