{"id":1324,"date":"2019-05-08T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-08T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/blog\/improved-cloud-service-performance-through-asic-acceleration"},"modified":"2025-06-23T12:11:16","modified_gmt":"2025-06-23T19:11:16","slug":"improved-cloud-service-performance-through-asic-acceleration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/blog\/improved-cloud-service-performance-through-asic-acceleration\/","title":{"rendered":"Improved cloud service performance through ASIC acceleration"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Delivering new, transformational capabilities increasingly requires that we develop for ourselves competencies which we\u2019d previously turned to our suppliers for. Our experience building Azure public cloud services over the last several years bears this out. We\u2019re now developing our own server infrastructure and investing in innovative silicon technologies, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), to accelerate our workloads \u2014 things that would have been unheard of years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Open Compute Project 2019 conference, we unveiled Project Zipline. Project Zipline is comprised of a new, cutting-edge compression and encryption pipeline and the contribution to open source of the register transfer language (RTL), which is used to implement it in hardware. Azure’s dramatic growth has rapidly increased our need for optimized data processing and storage systems. Zipline enables compression without compromise by simultaneously delivering higher compression ratios, higher throughput, and lower latency than other solutions available today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, we announce the companion technology to Project Zipline \u2014 Project Corsica<\/strong>. Over two years in the making, Corsica is our ASIC implementation of Zipline technology. It delivers Zipline\u2019s first rate performance in compression, encryption, and data authentication, all accelerated in a special purpose ASIC developed by Microsoft in collaboration with Broadcom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Internal innovations in data storage and encryption<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A massive surge in demand for data is taking place, straining the industry\u2019s storage capacities and data management capabilities. At the same time, security and privacy concerns have increased, making large-scale encryption an essential piece of the equation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years ago, we started looking at scale challenges in the cloud centered on data growth and the future of storage needs. In a digitized world where arti\u00ef\u00accial intelligence drives business processes, customer engagements, and autonomous infrastructure, we need to create and store more information than ever before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enter Project Corsica, which has the potential to be as transformative to our data storage capabilities as any singular technology we\u2019ve deployed to date. Fundamentally, data is at the heart of digital transformation, leveraged by companies to improve customer experiences and differentiate their products and services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Project Corsica was designed specifically with Azure\u2019s data storage needs and service quality guarantees in mind. Corsica can help to remove data processing bottlenecks by shifting compression and encryption away from the CPU and onto a dedicated hardware accelerator that\u2019s purpose built for these functions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Corsica\u2019s performance is stellar. It enables our cloud platform to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n