Facebook showed its proof of concept Blu Ray based cold storage solution at Open Compute Summit V.

Facebook has built a prototype system for storing petabytes on Blu-ray

by Derrick Harris

36 MINS AGO

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SUMMARY:
During the Open Compute Summit in San Jose, Facebook VP of Engineering Jay Parikh shared some big statistics for the company’s cold storage efforts, including those for a protoytpe Blu-ray system capable of storing a petabyte of data today.

James Hamilton posts on the idea of optical storage.

Next week, Facebook will show work they have been doing in cold storage mostly driven by their massive image storage problem. At OCP Summit V an innovative low-cost archival storage hardware platform will be shown. Archival projects always catch my interest because the vast majority of the world’s data is cold, the percentage that is cold is growing quickly, and I find the purity of a nearly single dimensional engineering problem to be super interesting. Almost the only dimension of relevance in cold storage is cost. See Glacier: Engineering for Cold Data Storage in the Cloud for more on this market segment and how Amazon Glacier is addressing it in the cloud.

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.

I’m a huge believer in leveraging consumer component volumes to produce innovative, low-cost server-side solutions. Optical is particularly interesting in this application and I’m looking forwarding to seeing more of the details behind the new storage platform. It looks like very interesting work.