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:They could save space by QuietLagoon · 2015-07-01 03:30 · Score: 5, Interesting

They could just delete most of the photos after they age a bit, analyzing it with some of their AI whiz-bang software....
More than a few of my [real world] friends use facebook as their archive for photos, eschewing local or cloud-based storage for their historical family photos. They would be unhappy if facebook were to randomly start deleting photos just because they've been on facebook for a period of time.
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Of course, I've told those friends that facebook may not have the same photo-preservation goals as they do, but they seem to be unconcerned.