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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.

5 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Write once? by WPIDalamar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Anyone know if these burners are write-once drives?

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

    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?

  2. Lots of redundant data by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    Summation 2
  3. Re:Longevity will be an issue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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