After a long hiatus because of school and personal matters, I am back in action and excited to talk about today’s topic. Before we get into that, here are a couple of announcements. First, I have finished my degree in Information and Telecommunication Technology, and currently re-working my resume to start sending out applications. Second, I am still working part-time for Greg Schulz, owner and founder of StorageIO, and you should check out his blogs [here].
As you might have guessed, today we are looking toward the light. No, not the desk lamp next to you, the sun outside (which you shouldn’t stare at by the way), or some metaphor. Today, we are going to be talking about optical storage. I originally found out about this medium through Greg Schulz, when we were conversing about different types of data storage. The conversation spread though the usual mediums, starting with solid state drives (SSD), moving to hard disk drives (HDD), and finally tape. Sometimes we would even shake things up and talk about all three at the same time *gasp* (details on those conversations will come on at a later time). At the end of the conversation, he asked me one question, “Have you heard of optical storage?”
I had studied optical networking before then, but had never even heard of optical storage. Naturally, my first questions where what is it used for, and if it was even in use today. He responded by asking me what I thought Blue-Ray discs were. He also mentioned Facebook doing something with optical storage if I was interested in learning more.
With that, I was on my way researching all I could about optical storage. I found a lot about what optical storage was, and how it works.
A magnified view of an optical disc with data burned on it. Credit given to igcseict.com
The picture above is of a magnified CD surface. Can you see the dots in the picture? The pattern of these dots is your data. When you are burning your favorite Justin Beiber song on a CD (if you still use them), your computer is creating a pattern on the CD to store that song. When inserted in a CD player, the laser inside will reflect the surface/pattern of the CD back to itself, and play the song.
Trying to find how it is used in the industry proved to be more challenging.
Facebook’s Blue-ray rack. Image: Kyle Owen
The short version:
-At this time all of Facebook’s cold storage is stored on HDD.
-They believe swapping to an optical system will be 50% cheaper then disk, and 80% more power efficient.
– Each disk is certified for 50 years of reliability
– Believes this is something better then disk, or tape for future demand for cold data.
If you would like the full article, you can click [here]
Is Facebook heading a paradigm shift in storage, or is their optical solution a dying hope to make optical a valuable alternative to tape archiving? My personal thoughts, and more will be explained in part two.
You can check out my other blog posts [here], and follow me on Twitter @StudentofIT. Until then, take care. 🙂
Cory Peden
StudentofIT 