Facebook stores “cold data” on 10,000 Blu-ray discs

When the average person thinks about 10,000 Blu-ray discs, they likely imagine an impressive movie collection, but when Facebook Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering Jay Parikh and Director of Infrastructure Jason Taylor thought about 10,000 Blu-ray discs, data storage came to mind. The social network is currently testing a prototype storage system made up of 10,000 Blu-ray discs, which it revealed at OCP Summit V in San Jose, Calif., Tuesday, PCWorld reported.

If you thought Netflix and iTunes would make optical discs a thing of the past, think again. Facebook has built a storage system from 10,000 Blu-ray discs that holds a petabyte of data and is highly energy-efficient, the company said Tuesday. Facebook said last year that it was exploring Blu-ray for its data-center storage needs, and on Tuesday it showed a prototype system at the Open Compute Project summit meeting in San Jose, California. It designed the system to store data that hardly ever needs to be accessed, or for so-called “cold storage.” That includes duplicates of its users’ photos and videos that Facebook keeps for backup purposes, and which it essentially wants to file away and forget.