Facebook will create an energy-efficient data storage of 10,000 Blu-ray discs

Facebook announced the creation of a petabyte data storage exclusively from Blu-ray discs. Last year, the company said it was exploring the possibilities of Blu-ray, for use in their DC, and on Tuesday showed a prototype system at the Open Compute Project summit in San Jose.

This system is used to store data that "should not be demanded" or for the so-called "cold storage". In practice, we are talking about backups of custom videos and photos.

This innovation is 50% cheaper and consumes 80% less electricity than the current cold storage system that uses hard drives. In the future we are going to increase the storage capacity to 5 petabytes.

Facebook Vice President Jay Parikh.
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Blu-ray discs are a good solution for “cold storage”, because they cost much less than hard drives and have a lot of potential for increasing data density.

Jason Taylor, Director of Facebook Infrastructure

At the moment there is only a prototype, but the "field" trials will begin later this year. Blu-ray is only an intermediate stage. In the end, the company wants to switch to low-power flash memory as the primary way to store “cold data”.

From the outside, it all looks like a regular server cabinet, 2 meters high. Inside there are stacks of disks that are moved by a robotic mechanism into one of 16 drives that write data to a disk.



Source: http://www.computerworld.com/
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