Every day, countless numbers of photos, videos, and other types of files that are uploaded by hundreds of millions of users to Facebook. Only a fraction of them are often viewed by the user. However, all of the content is certainly needs to be saved so that it takes up space on the storage media server social networking.
How can I make obsolete content can be retained in storage media (that does not disappear when the sought after) but not too take place and costs? Facebook felt the need to find an alternative in addition to conventional hard disk.
Last week, at the Open Compute Summit, the company showed a prototype system of cold storage that use Blu-ray discs to store data for up to a Petabyte or count millions of gigabytes.
As many as 10,000 Blu-ray disc can be stored in a special cupboard the height of over 2 meters. Arm-arm robot then picks up the disc-the disc is arranged in a series of magasin for retrieving the data from the appropriate disc.
A Blu-ray disc itself designed to accommodate data ranging from 25 GB to any pieces of single-layer up to 128 GB of on chip variant 4-layer.
Quoted from The Verge, Vice President, technical Facebook Jay Parikh said that Blu-ray based systems this could save you up to 80 percent energy usage and cost up to 50 percent compared to conventional cold storage methods that rely on the hard disk.
Blu-ray is not ideal for the main storage medium for data transfer rate is relatively slow, but this disc is suitable for storing data that is infrequently accessed, such as photo and video files backup Facebook users.
Currently, data storage Blu-ray is already starting to be used by Facebook and can store large amounts of data, up to 30 Petabytes. In the future, the social networking company that intends to use energy-efficient flash memory to store data, but this solution is relatively expensive compared to other alternatives.