Thursday, February 6, 2014

Optical Archival Storage Technology in Facebook

Verbatim 5.25" floppy disk by goosmurf from Flickr under CC
With some much happening around Big Data, it is interesting to know some of the happenings in the storage space even for those who are not much into hardware. Here is an interesting perspective from James Hamilton on how Facebook uses optical technology for cold storage (aka archival).

This Facebook hardware project is particularly interesting in that it’s based upon an optical media rather than tape. Tape economics come from a combination of very low cost media combined with only a small number of fairly expensive drives. The tape is moved back and forth between storage slots and the drives when needed by robots. Facebook is taking the same basic approach of using robotic systems to allow a small number of drives to support a large media pool. But, rather than using tape, they are leveraging the high volume Blu-ray disk market with the volume economics driven by consumer media applications. Expect to see over a Petabyte of Blu-ray disks supplied by a Japanese media manufacturer housed in a rack built by a robotic systems supplier.

Here is a video from Facebook showing the actual hardware and an article from Arstechnica. Finally, below is a video (around 30 minutes) with Facebook VP Jay Parikh discussing cold storage and Blu-rays.

1 comment:

  1. Four gram DNA can store all the world-data produces in an year
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2012/11/28/big-data-dna/

    ReplyDelete