Freeze Ray: Blu-Ray Cold Storage for Your Data Center

Last year we brought you inside Facebook’s data center to see its Blu-Ray cold storage system, a new way to manage the flood of incoming data from Facebook users, who upload more than 900 million photos every day. Thus far this system is operating in just two data centers, the Facebook facilities in North Carolina and Oregon.

Now Facebook is teaming with Panasonic to make this technology available to data centers everywhere. The commercial version of Blu-Ray cold storage, known as Freeze Ray Optical Data Archiver, is designed to provide a new alternative for companies seeking to store massive amounts of data in long-term storage archives.

“We think this solution will be very attractive to the data center industry,” said Yasu Enokido, President of Panasonic’s AVC Networks Company, who introduced the product last week at CSE 2016 in Las Vegas. “We plan to make these optical disc archivers an industry standard.”

The main selling point for Freeze Ray will be the ability to lower the cost of data archiving, as Blur-Ray disc offer considerable energy savings – which is what intially attracted Facebook to the technology.

Facebook might be unique in the scale of its storage operation, but its not alone in the need to think big when it comes to data storage. With a proliferation of technologies that generate “big data,” more companies will begin to see their archiving requirements scale to the point that they start to look like Facebook.

Slashing Costs for Long-Term Storage

Blu-Ray is an optical data storage format that uses blue lasers to read a disk. It is best known as a medium for video players and gaming systems like the PlayStation and Xbox One, as the discs can store large amounts of data.

It’s not useful for primary storage, since data can’t be retrieved instantly. But using Blu-Ray disks offers savings of up to 50 percent compared with the first generation of Facebook’s cold storage design, since the Blu-Ray cabinet only uses energy when it is writing data during the initial data “burn,” and doesn’t use energy when it is idle.

Last June we saw the system in action at Facebook’s data center in Forest City, North Carolina, where the company operates one of its cold storage facilities for long-term storage of user photos.

The Blu-Ray system stored five units per Open Rack, each housing carousels filled with Blu-Ray disks. When data must be accessed, the action happens in the rear of the unit. That’s where the robotic retrieval system has been condensed into a space in the bottom of the rack. When it springs into action, the arm travels along tracks on either side of the rack, fetches a Blu-Ray disk, pulls data off the disc and writes it to a live server.