Facebookhas developed a storage system that packs 1 petabyte of data into a single cabinet filled with 10,000 Blu-Ray optical discs.
Facebook hopes to put the Blu-Ray storage unit into production by the end of this year, providing “ultra-cold” storage for older photos. The company showed off its prototype this week at the Open Compute Summit. But it’s not just a novelty. Over the long term, Facebook believes Blu-Ray has the potential to move beyond its origins in consumer video and became a durable, cost-effective data storage medium.
Blu-Ray is not ideal for primary storage because data can’t be retrieved instantly. But it has other selling points, especially cost. Using Blu-Ray disks offers savings of up to 50 percent compared with the hard disks Facebook is using in its newly-completed cold storage facility at its data center in Oregon. The Facebook prototype also uses 80 percent less energy than cold storage racks, since the Blu-Ray cabinet only uses energy when it is writing data during the initial date “burn,” and doesn’t use energy when it is idle.
