Where Facebook Stores 900 Million New Photos Per Day

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday July 1, 2015 @03:01AM from the prints-them-and-mails-them-to-toledo dept.

1sockchuck writes: Facebook faces unique storage challenges. Its users upload 900 million new images daily, most of which are only viewed for a couple of days. The social network has built specialized cold storage facilities to manage these rarely-accessed photos. Data Center Frontier goes inside this facility, providing a closer look at Facebook's newest strategy: Using thousands of Blu-Ray disks to store images, complete with a robotic retrieval system (see video demo). Others are interested as well. Sony recently acquired a Blu-Ray storage startup founded by Open Compute chairman Frank Frankovsky, which hopes to drive enterprise adoption of optical data storage.

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Re:Delete? by bill_mcgonigle · 2015-07-01 03:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

What happens when a user wants to delete an image permanently.
What gave you the idea that's a service Facebook offers?

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My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Amazing by bws111 · 2015-07-01 03:56 · Score: 3, Insightful

Wow, they discovered HSM only 40 years after it was introduced. Amazing.
1. Re:Amazing by Ravaldy · 2015-07-01 04:28 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Pointless arrogant comment.
  Nobody claimed it was new or that they had reinvented anything. They just applied modern technology to a well know strategy to solve a known problem. In the modern age of storage and data centers I have yet to see this (not to say that nobody has done it).
  When someone shows you an electric car do you tell them cars have had 4 wheels since before 1903? I assume you do.