Under The Hood: Facebook’s Cold Storage System

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Mattias Geniar, May 09, 2015

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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.



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