Facebook’s next compute challenge is cold storage

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

We know that Facebook is building a storage facility next to its Prineville data center, but in a conversation ahead of our Structure Europe event this month in Amsterdam I spoke with Facebook’s Jay Parikh to learn more about Facebook’s data center for digital packrats. Facebook is a designing a new data center designed specifically to store all those photos of your baby from three years ago or your senior road trip from seven years ago for the long haul. It has to be cheap, it has to be power efficient. And it’s a fundamentally different data center design and compute architecture than the big web companies use today.

Ahead of his talk with me later this month at our Structure:Europe conference in Amsterdam, I spoke with Jay Parikh, VP of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, about the computing challenges facing the giant social network. The one most on his mind at the moment is how to store users’ photos, videos and other digital bits so they can access them anytime they want. Like the piles of albums I have from my high school days, our digital photos have to live somewhere, so Facebook is trying to create a data center equivalent to that dusty old box in the attic that you only open when you move…

He says Facebook is rethinking the infrastructure for how it stores huge repositories or photos and videos in a way that’s accessible and convenient but also cost-effective. Unlike a business that might store records on tape, Facebook can’t afford to let users wait that long to access something, nor can it afford to build data centers that keep photos in caches next to the servers (those Fusion-io machines aren’t cheap!)…

Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/facebooks-next-compute-challenge-is-cold-storage/