Facebook is building a vast new "cold storage" facility in the US to
archive all the messages, photos and other postings that its over
billion users do not need every day but want to retain for future
reference.
A 16,000-square-foot data centre under construction in
Prineville, Oregon, is designed to provide a more efficient home for
older and less popular material.
The new cold storage facility will join two existing data centres in Prineville, The Oregonian reported.
Facebook
knows you might want to see your old photos again someday. Or scroll
back through your Timeline to revisit your posts as an online diary. But
storing all those pictures and keeping them immediately available takes
a lot of space.
Not in the physical sense, but in the virtual. That means lots of hard drives, lots of storage and lots of energy.
So
Facebook is preparing to try out a more efficient storage system at its
Prineville "cold storage", for those archival posts that people don't
need every day, but that they don't want to lose altogether.
Facebook
says 82 per cent of its traffic is focused on just 8 per cent of its
photos. Its cold storage facility is designed to create a more efficient
way to store those photos that are not in heavy rotation.
The
cold storage building is just a skeletal frame now, and a concrete pad.
Facebook hopes to have the first of three phases up and running soon.
Each
of the three 16,000-square-foot data hubs could hold an exabyte of
data, equivalent to 1 million hard drives inside a contemporary personal
computer.
The tens of thousands of servers inside the two
existing buildings are always on, ready to deliver your pictures and
musings to your Facebook friends around the world.
By contrast,
most of the computers in the new cold storage facility will be asleep. A
few will be alert, awaiting a request for old material and ready to
summon the slumbering computers to provide their data.
This
material won't reach your computer as quickly as something posted just a
few hours ago, but Facebook says it won't take long.
"The
principle will be so that it doesn't impact the user experience, so
think about a matter of seconds, or milliseconds," said Michael
Kirkland, a Facebook communication manager.
Facebook estimates a cold-storage data center will cost one-third less than its standard data center.