The Blu-ray disk format has a new tech-giant customer.
The Blu-ray disk format may have been the winner in the last major disk format war, but life of the optical disk is apparently threatened by obsolescence as video is quickly moving online to convenient streaming and downloading services like Netflix.
But a new ray of hope has come for the format from the tech industry – and Facebook is leading the way. Read on to find out what Facebook wants to do with 10,000 Blu-ray disks.This week, the Open Compute Project Summit takes place in San Jose, California. The iconic social network that manages 350 million new photo uploads per day faces the perpetual challenge of efficient data storage. It’s latest idea is surprisingly un-futuristic however. Something amazing you may wonder? Not exactly, the optical disk format Blu-ray no less. The company wants to drop infrequently used data on the disks and the Blu-ray option cuts costs by 50% while reducing energy expense by 80%. It involves employing a robotic system to draw and drop the disks for data burning. The particular disk used is a 3-layer 100GB disk, and come in 12 disk cartridges of 1.2TB, totalling 1 petabyte per cartridge.
The new generation of consoles featured a debate on the need for optical disk drives. Microsoft seemed poised to originally sell the Xbox One with a one-time use only for installing games, while quietly adopting Blu-ray also for movies. Sony on the other hand chose to maintain full usage of the optical disk drive in the PS4, which benefits from an updated version of the Blu-ray player which debuted in the PS3. Sony’s plan seems to be to facilitate disk-use while game downloading gradually increases inline with global broadband speed.
If Facebook takes up the Blu-ray disk for data storage, it will be interesting to see if any other companies follow suit. It could be a surprising lease of life for the what might be a powerful, but ageing format.
Discuss:
Has Facebook made a good decision? Would you recommend another solution? Will other companies follow?
[Via Forbes]
You must be logged in to post a comment.