Facebook puts old pics and vids into 'cold storage'
New facility intended to cut the cost of long-term storage of infrequently accessed data
Facebook is to open a "cold storage" facility at its datacentre in Prineville, Oregon, to provide a lower cost repository for its users' old and infrequently accessed photographs and videos.
"The origination of cold storage is that we have all of these photos and our contract with users states that we can't delete the data when it's not accessed," said Jay Parikh, vice president for infrastructure and engineering at Facebook.
He added: "We get about seven petabytes of new photo content uploaded every month. We get about 300 million photos uploaded every day from our users and, with the adoption of mobile around the world, all of these trends are getting bigger."
Not only must Facebook store and maintain the integrity of all that data, it needs to remain near-instantly accessible – ruling out cheaper storage alternatives such as tape.
Cold storage is part of a wider datacentre strategy intended to both reduce the cost and improve the operational and energy efficiency of building and running datacentres. The strategy is being shared under the Facebook-led Open Compute Initiative.
"We are working on a new infrastructure from the ground up – a different type of datacentre, a different type of storage hardware, and a network that connects it all," Parikh told the GigaOM Structure:Europe conference this week.
The Open Compute Initiative and the development of the cold storage facility is part of an operational and public relations "arms race" between the major internet companies to demonstrate their efficiency and "green" credentials.
"A lot of the technologies that we have been talking about, like cold storage, need lots of storage space, but not so much power," said Parikh. "We can't disrupt or change the API that our product engineers use to store their blogs, videos and attachments in their messages. We don't want to change that or service response times. The software underneath all that needs to seamlessly handle migration of this data."
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Facebook puts old pics and vids into 'cold storage'
New facility intended to cut the cost of long-term storage of infrequently accessed data
Swedish datacentre
Earlier this year, Facebook claimed that it would disclose all of its datacentre power and carbon footprint statistics. "One of the key parts of that announcement was making sure that by 2015 we would be using 25 per cent clean energy across our datacentre operations 'footprint'," said Parikh.
Facebook's new datacentre in Luleå in Sweden will be among the first fruits of the Open Compute Initiative. It is the first Facebook datacentre to be built from non-OEM hardware in line with Open Compute principles. In the past, Facebook has bought off-the-shelf servers from HP and Dell for its datacentres.
Facebook claims that the technology developed under Open Compute is 38 per cent more energy efficient and 24 per cent cheaper to build and run compared to conventional datacentres.
The PuE [Power Usage Effectiveness] metric of its Luleå datacentre is expected to weigh in at around 1.07 or 1.08, according to Parikh, making it one of the most efficient datacentres in the world.
There were two major reasons for choosing both Sweden and that particular location, he added. First, Sweden offers a diverse supply of low-cost renewable energy from nearby hydro-electric facilities, and a power grid proofed against outages, which also means a lower investment in back-up power generation is required. That, in turn, also improves power efficiency.
Second, the location means that the datacentre's servers can be naturally cooled for 10 months of the year. "We don't have to run any air conditioners or other fancy equipment. Essentially, we just need to open up the windows and blow a little air into the datacentre to cool the equipment," said Parikh – although that air would have to be filtered first, of course.
To make the facility more resilient in networking terms, Facebook is also installing a fibre network in the region to make sure that it can handle the workloads that it will be required to serve when it comes online.
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