Facebook Puts 10,000 Blu-ray Discs In Low-Power Storage System

itwbennett writes "Facebook said last year that it was exploring Blu-ray for its data-center storage needs, and on Tuesday it showed a prototype system at the Open Compute Project summit meeting in San Jose, California. It designed the system to store data that hardly ever needs to be accessed, or for so-called 'cold storage' (think duplicates of users' photos and videos that it keeps for backup). The Blu-ray system reduces costs by 50% and energy use by 80% compared with its current cold-storage system, which uses hard disk drives, said Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure engineering." It's a prototype, and they're also evaluating low power flash as another alternative to keeping seldom accessed data on hard drives.

Comments

Re:Finally a demonstration

[NotQuiteReal]

I predict the squirrels win. The one ox will eventually die, but a thousand squirrels is a viable population.

Lots of redundant data

[Rik Sweeney]

It designed the system to store data that hardly ever needs to be accessed

So that will be several million inactive profiles. I hope they've made their solution scalable, pretty soon they'll be storing 75% of their current profiles on those discs.

Re:Write once?

[StripedCow]

When you delete your account, somebody will go and get the corresponding disk, copy it (except your data), and destroy the old disk.

It's write-once only if you don't consider "destroy" a write-operation.

Re:Longevity will be an issue

[Anonymous Coward]

For that first year, he was probably trying fucking a bit harder rather than worrying about data recovery. Priorities, lonely internet dude, priorities.