Social networking giant Facebook is reportedly building a huge “cold storage” facility to keep an archive of all the content including messages, photo and other stuff, from its more than 1 billion members, that aren’t needed every day but wanted to be retained for future references.
The company is building a 16,000 square foot data centre Prineville, Oregon in the U.S. The data centre has been especially designed to keep the costs of storing low and being an efficient storage for older but less popular content.
According to Facebook’s figures, only 8 percent of the billions of the images on the site got around 85 percent of traffic. Facebook aims to slash its energy costs by putting that highly accessed 8 percent data on a fast data centre and the rest in a relatively slow facility.
“The principle will be so that it doesn’t impact the user experience – so think about a matter of seconds, or milliseconds,” says a Facebook spokesperson.
Facebook already has cold storage facility at its two data centres in Prineville. The two data centres have the capacity to store an Exabyte of data, the equivalent of 250 million DVDs full of information.
Facebook says the new data centre will have more hard drives connected to each server computers. This means a photo may take slightly longer time to load but overall will increase efficiency of the social networking platform.
Source: The Telegraph