Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Think about it....from the description it sounds like they are essentially archived based on time of upload. So when 5 years rolls around, guess where everybody's 5 year old photos are going to be: all on the same batch of blurays. So when 5 years approaches, they pre-copy those blurays back into online storage. After 3 months or whatever, those photos get purged from online storage and the old blurays are once again the only copy.
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.
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.