Facebook's new optical storage solution [video]

Another benefit of this system is that the storage media is immune electromagnetic pulse. So, even in the case of a large-scale EMP event our cat pictures and network graphs will remain intact and recoverable. :)

Can anyone knowledgeable explain why they use Blu-Ray instead of tape backup? When would an organization use Blu-Ray, and when wouldn't then? Is this reflective of any kind of general trend?

My hopes were dashed when I realized that this wasn't a new type of optical hard disc, like holographic drive technology or something.

No comment on the access time and having only one drive means reading only one disc at once. This puts this storage solution in the realm of "I don't need this data within an hour" so I presume the application this system acts as redundancy for failed disks.

Are these Blu-ray disks rewritable? If so, wouldn't this be a great tech for Amazon's Glacier service? I believe they currently depend of costly tape drives to store data.

Does anyone know what data is Facebook trying to archive? Old user posts? But that doesn&#x27;t fit this usecase because of the high latency.<p>Or maybe its just a nice content delivery mechanism to the NSA. Just ship a bunch of blue-rays instead of pesky optical fiber interception.

Facebook has built a novel implementation, but this isn&#x27;t a new idea or product. Similar to how they used to buy servers and now build them to spec, they probably used to buy these and now design and build them.<p><a href="http://www.disc-group.com/products/bd-series-benefits/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.disc-group.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;bd-series-benefits&#x2F;</a>

After I saw this on James Hamilton&#x27;s blog the other day I did a quick check of BD-R versus 4TB HDDs cost per GB. Using whatever I could find after about 5 minutes of looking around, I came up with $0.05&#x2F;GB for both types of media.<p>If anyone can provide a link to BD media for sale at a price that make this economical I&#x27;d be interested to know.

Any guess on the total storage capacity in that rack and comparison to a similar sized magnetic storage?

I was expecting some kind of optical fiber storage with reflecting crystals and shit.<p>This was a bit disappointing.

I might be interested in cloud backup service which would backup my &quot;keep forever&quot; stuff, put them to optical disc and then mail the discs to me when they fill up.<p>Could be also an add-on service to existing online backup business.

What about bit rot though? Some of my dvdr are no longer readable after 5 yrs, stored in very good conditions. Hdd backup, esp. with Zfs can provide very good bit rot protection.

FB: How can you get a consumer version of this so that you don&#x27;t have to use Amazon Glacier for personal data archival?!

I did not know that they made disks that are certified for long term storage like that.

At 1:55 he says &quot;FRID&#x27;d&quot;, he meant RFID&#x27;d, right?

Still magnetic storage however you read&#x2F;write the data...

Flash required, so it won&#x27;t play here.<p>Really, Facebook? It&#x27;s 2014.