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' (think duplicates of users' photos and
videos that it keeps for backup). The Blu-ray system reduces costs by 50% and energy use by 80%
compared with its current cold-storage system, which uses hard disk
drives, said Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure
engineering
