Facebook Cold Storage Efforts Lead To Petabyte Blu-Ray System

In a world filled with storage options, there's still no perfect solution to long-term cold storage for corporations and those who need to archive data for the long haul. Facebook has been making strides in this area, and revealed in 2013 that Blu-ray discs were one area of focus. Fast-forward to this year's Open Compute Summit, where the social network has detailed the fruits of its efforts.

Facebook Vice President of Engineering Jay Parikh spoke at the Open Compute Summit, which is taking place today and tomorrow in San Jose. During his talk, Parikh detailed Facebook's continued cold storage efforts, and went on to detail what strides it has made with the Blu-ray focus he spoke of around this time last year.

The storage solution is a Blu-ray system that is presently in a prototype format, utilizing up to 10,000 Blu-ray discs that comprise up to one petabyte of data within a single cabinet setup. This is just the start for the social network, however, which is working towards boosting a per-cabinet storage capacity to five petabytes.

A Blu-ray storage system has a few perks over hard drives and flash, namely a cost savings to the company of 50-percent, as well as a savings of 80-percent in terms of energy usage. The data could be stored for 50 years. According to Parikh, the social network anticipates having a cold storage data rate of 150 petabytes in the next couple of months.

SOURCE: GigaOm