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

Posted by Unknown on from the 2002-wants-its-backup-solution-back dept.

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.

3 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Write once? by lagomorpha2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If so, it pretty much guarantees that Facebook keeps a copy of your stuff forever, even if you "delete" it.

    Facebook keeps a copy of your stuff forever, even if you "delete it". So does gmail/google. Even stuff you type into a textbox but never submit.

    http://www.slate.com/articles/...

    Come to think of it, "deleted data" is probably exactly what this cold storage is for. They never have to worry about overwriting it when users change the data because it's data the users have already "deleted".

  2. Re:Write once? by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    Except they won't. Facebook doesn't delete your data when you delete you account *now*, what makes you think they'll do it when it becomes this much harder?

  3. Re:Write once? by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Huh? How would a 5-10 Blu-Ray autochanger be userul for backups? 10 BDs equals a paltry 360GB of data storage; that's only enough for 1/3 of a typical 1TB hard drive. BDs are nearly useless because they simply don't store much data; why FB is bothering with them, I have no idea. Optical discs have always been found to be pretty awful in terms of storage capacity and data integrity over time compared to tapes. The only problem tapes have is the drives are expensive, but large companies don't have a problem with spending $2k on a drive. On a per-GB basis, they're easily the cheapest thing out there.