Facebook to Freeze Away Your Photos With Panasonic's New Data Centre Solution

Panasonic at its pre-CES 2016 event on Tuesday announced it has developed an optical disc-based data archive system to meet the growing demand for storage and access of infrequently or never accessed data stored for the long term in data centres.

Developed in collaboration with Facebook, Panasonic was able to design Freeze-Ray, an optical data archival solution that helps ensure safe storage of valuable data over decades in data centres, the company said.

Both companies have been working on two generations of the Freeze-Ray solution - Facebook uses a first-generation 100GB Blu-ray disc-based archive system in its data centres at present, and expects deployment of the second-generation 300GB Archival Disc-based archive system later in 2016.

"The work we've done with Panasonic is exciting because optical storage introduces a medium that is immutable, which helps ensure that people have long-term access to their digital memories," said Jason Taylor, PhD, VP of Infrastructure, Facebook in an emailed statement.

Panasonic's provided its high-density optical technology and hardware expertise in optical discs, drives, robotics and library software to control the system in the data centre. Facebook provided its expertise in designing, deploying, managing and servicing storage systems in data centres.

Both companies see many advantages of deploying the Freeze-Ray data archiving solution, which brings greater economies of scale.

Facebook and Panasonic plan to collaborate in the study of and eventual development of 500GB-and one-terabyte archival discs to create a multi-petabyte cold storage archive system for higher economies of scale.

Sony and Panasonic had announced new optical disc standard for long term data storage, called the Archival Disc in March 2014, which they expect to scale to 1TB capacities in the long run.