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Panasonic To Commercialize Facebook's Blu-Ray Cold Storage Systems (cio.com)
itwbennett writes: A couple of years ago, Facebook revealed it was using Blu-ray disks as a cost-efficient way to archive the billions of images that users uploaded to its service. When Facebook users upload photos, they're often viewed frequently in the first week, so Facebook stores them on solid state drives or spinning hard disks. But as time goes on the images get viewed less and less. At a certain point, Facebook dumps them onto high-capacity Blu ray discs, where they might sit for years without being looked at. Now, Panasonic has said it plans to commercialize the technology for other businesses, and is working on new disks that will hold a terabyte of data.
We should necro our old "cold stored" images on FB.
Let's test their claim of power savings :)
Wow... what will those wizz kids come up with next.
So Face book has bluerays that are full of kittens and selfies does anyone care if they store them for more than a month I mean really!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
So, similar to the IBM 3850 family with write-once media and a massively higher media density?
Coming real soon now!
Facebook has this new feature called Memories where they show you pictures that you uploaded on this date X number of years ago. On days in the past (like when I was on vacation), they might show me a new picture every day for a week straight.
Wouldn't moving these pictures over to "cold" storage significantly slow down whatever batch process they are using to recover this data every day? You would think that they would want to keep this data on active disk if they are running through it daily with huge batch jobs.
A more cynical and literal interpretation of "Panasonic has said it plans to commercialize the technology for other businesses" might be:
Facebook has been collecting these unused photos for years with the intent of providing them to the CIA (who originally invested in FB, Google it). Then, instead, NSA staffed plant employees and stole the data for free. Panasonic has said it has plans to commercialize the technology (and data) for other businesses. An obvious first customer will be car companies with large advertising budgets. They will be using Facebook's graph of friends to identify influencers in each person's life. Then, with image recognition, they will identify cars in the long history of users' photos. So, for example, if your crush has been driving the latest Audi, and you currently are not driving an Audi, and you have been seen around Audis in the past, then you are a prime candidate for more direct advertising.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
In the past, one could buy a 400 CD or DVD changer for a few C-notes.
Why can't we have this technology, except with a BDXL or other high capacity Blu-Ray drive? This isn't rocket science, as the autochanger mechanism has lasted for decades in a lot of people's homes before they put their collection on their computer. Sony does have it, but it is priced into the stratosphere.
Putting the pieces together, it wouldn't be surprising to see the autochanger mechanism in many audiophile hi-fi cabinets still usable, add in a 300GB to 1TB Blu-Ray writer, add a few TB of SSD as a landing zone for data, then add some backup software like NetBackup. This would give tape a run for its money.
Now, add some form factor like disk packs (sort of like the 5-10 disk caddies that were popular way back when), some redundancy (basically one disk with a PAR archive on it), and it would have the ability to function almost exactly as tape... but for far cheaper. To boot, removed disks take up 0 watts of power (other than environmental), not to mention being immune from remote tampering.
I just wish this type of solution can hit the consumer market.
Optical discs? Isn't that some crap from like the days of dual floppy drives. Cold storage? How come they gotta keep the storage cold, doesn't the refrigeration cost a bunch? One Terabyte? Is that all?
Ummm.. Archival Disc, anyone?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Modern app appers app their apps using APPS, not LUDDITE storage like Blu-Rays!
Apps!
"working on new disks that will hold a terabyte of data"
I know you were just about to ask 'Why don't we already have TB optical disks?'
I don't have a clue. You will just have to go to Disney, the MPAA, the RIAA and all the other copyright hoarders for the answer.
...omphaloskepsis often...
So I guess when a user decides to delete photos they effectively live on in Facebook storage indefinitely?
There were plenty of these jukeboxes storage systems with CD-R in use even before 2000, and I am sure tapes with automatic tape-loader were in use for even longer before then.
So Panasonic now just re-discovered the jukebox? And that is supposed to be news? What's next? They found that they can also make duplicate disks to send one to offsite storage?
Oliver.
I'm remembering ~20 years back when HP made MO disk jukeboxes. All was well until they started mis-filing disks and randomly erasing data that was supposed to be kept. Ugly. Maybe Panasonic can overcome this, but I'm skeptical of the value.
Organization? You must be joking..
This is called Information Lifecycle Management and has been common practice for many decades now. Yes decades. I worked on Panasonic jukebox WORM (Write Once Read Many) ILM systems (both hardware and software) in the 90s. The real news here is not that Facebook is using ILM, but the new BlueRay technology being used.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
So that's why it takes so darn long to load each page when I scroll down through my old pictures!
That's what I was thinking. If nobody views them after a week or so, then why keep them around at all? Seems like Facebook could cut their costs quite a bit if they just deleted the data after a couple months.
Seriously? Wow.. You are an idiot. So you expect people to completely rebuild their photo pages etc etc every month? Yeah, that's the kind of business decision that would keep people coming back to facebook. And that's coming from someone who doesn't use it and never will. What you said is just that stupid.
Ignoring for the moment how long it'll take them to develop this.. I am reminded of the farce that went on for years for me with backup tapes. I'd buy a tape drive and tapes, back stuff up. The tapes would either degrade, or the drive would degrade, and all the above would be useless; I'd buy a new drive, not be able to read the old tapes even if they appeared to be good, so I'd buy new tapes, start all over again. Rinse, repeat; eventually I gave up and chucked the whole mess and didn't bother anymore. Are these discs going to be a redux of that experience? Become unusable by the time I find a need to read something off them? Or use some proprietary format that no one else supports, or that they claim to support, only to find that it's not reliable enough to be practical, and I lose everything on them anyway? Honestly, is this going to be any better than just buying a few extra hard disks, connecting them to use as backups, then stuffing them into antistatic bags and storing them somewhere safe until I need them? Once bitten, twice shy, as they say.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I know on CD's and CDR's, the data deteriorates after a few years. Errors. Pretty soon unreadable.
Doesn't the same situation arise with BlueRay? Or is it eternal like the Pyramids?
It was called the Epoch storage system, used a small number of spinning rust drives as NFS-exported storage, publishing a filesystem that basically just lied about its size. On the back were one or more Hitachi jukeboxes stuffed with rewritable magneto-optical drives of some format that escapes me. Absolutely miserable environment to disaster recover into; ISTR a 'newfs' chugging along at about 4 inodes/sec.
I'm curious as to what type of Blu-ray media they're using. Discs made using photo-sensitive dyes can degrade to the point of being unreadable very quickly. M-Disc based media is supposed to be much more robust, but you pay for it.
A 25 GB M-Disc Blu-ray costs about $3 in smaller volumes. You can also buy 100 GB discs, but they are quite expensive, relatively speaking, at around $15 each. If you value your data, then you probably don't mind paying that much.
Proof they never delete your content? I doubt they are expensive re-writable.
Haha Facebook jokes..........
This is an actually interesting article.
1, people ACTUALLY genuinely working on large optical disks (instead of another "theoretically, we could do 1TB discs!" post, which I've been seeing for a decade
2, some kind of fairly cool optical disc changing system - aren't you interested in the file system? What about redundancy? The article indicated it's significantly lower power. What about long term reliability.
Nope, facebook jokes instead, this isn't reddit.
Found this one
http://panasonic.net/avc/archiver/freeze-ray
http://na.industrial.panasonic.com/solutions/data-center