Facebook shadow tests Blu-Ray discs for long term cold data centre storage saying it’s efficient and elegant.
Thu 3 Apr 2014
Frank Frankovsky, VP of hardware design and supply chain operations at Facebook, talks about why this “consumer” technology is possibly finding favour in its Open Compute Project to Jon Bodkin, of ARS Technica. It currently uses spinning discs and reckons the Blu Ray will be half the price and 80% more energy efficient.
Excerpt
“With disk drives, “you need to have a relatively aggressive erasure encoding environment where you have a lot more physical spinning disks, so you can sustain multiple failures and be able to recreate the file in any situation,” Frankovsky said. Because the predictive annual failure rate for optical discs is lower, “it’s quite possible that you won’t need to over-provision how much optical capacity you have to be able to get the same level of protection with the complete file rebuild. There’s kind of a double goodness there. Bit for bit, it’s lower cost, and if we can over-provision less with optical, you can move that needle even further on the cost-saving side.”
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/
