An interesting look at how Facebook handles the cold storage of its users .
Among others, it covers Open Vault Storage and Open Rack , both hardware designs from the Open Compute Project .
We knew that building a completely new system from top to bottom would bring challenges. But some of them were extremely nontechnical and simply a side effect of our scale.
For example, one of our test production runs hit a complete standstill when we realized that the data center personnel simply could not move the racks. Since these racks were a modification of the OpenVault system, we used the same rack castors that allowed us to easily roll the racks into place. But the inclusion of 480 4 TB drives drove the weight to over 1,100 kg, effectively crushing the rubber wheels.
That’s a scale many of us can only dream of.