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Where Facebook Stores 900 Million New Photos Per Day

Posted by Soulskill on 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.

7 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. They could save space by NotQuiteReal · · Score: 3, Funny

    They could just delete most of the photos after they age a bit, analyzing it with some of their AI whiz-bang software.

    If anyone ever asks to see the image again, they can just show one that is "close enough" and nobody would ever know the difference.

    I personally, have never posted a photo to Facebook, so I'd be OK with that.

    --
    This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
    1. Re:They could save space by QuietLagoon · · 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.

      .
      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.

  2. Re:Delete? by bill_mcgonigle · · 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?

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  3. Re:Delete? by NatasRevol · · Score: 3, Informative

    I see you haven't read Facebook's terms of service.

    There is no delete.

    --
    There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
  4. Going on for a while by Alomex · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've noticed large latency for rarely used pictures in FB for over eight months now, and by large latency I mean visit the page, then come back the next day to see the next batch of > 5 year old pictures and wait another day for the final batch of ~10 years ago pictures.

  5. Re:Replace them by Irate+Engineer · · Score: 4, Funny

    After 3 months of no views, just replace them with a goatse image.

    Dear God, there is more than one!?!

    --

    Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!

    Vote for Bernie in 2016!

  6. Amazing by bws111 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wow, they discovered HSM only 40 years after it was introduced. Amazing.