Facebook announced the development of a new type of storage device that can hold a petabyte of data on 10,000 Blu-ray discs. They claim that this type of storage reduces initial cost by 50% and reduces energy use by 80% over their current storage devices which use hard drives.
The new optical storage device is designed to hold rarely used data, such as backups of user photos and videos, but not primary copies that would exist on faster storage units.
The machines that Facebook has built are prototypes, but production of more of these storage units is expected to take place later this year. According to Gigaom, Facebook is already storing 30 petabytes of data in this type of machine, and Facebook plans to expand storage of each unit from 1 petabyte to 5 petabytes per machine.
Looking at the numbers given by Facebook, they have to be using 100gb triple layer Blu-ray discs. Since even the 50gb Blu-ray available to the general public have not been entirely reliable, I have to wonder at the source that Facebook uses for their discs, and if they are made to a higher, "archival" standard. And how do they test for data corruption?
There is more information available from the IDG News Service and Ars Technica.
