Facebook-Prineville shows off ‘cold storage’
The Facebook Data Center in Prineville has been in Central Oregon for several years. Monday, NewsChannel 21 took a tour of the facility to see the company’s latest project.
Facebook says they are beginning to archive photos that were posted years ago in their new ‘cold storage’ building.
“I imagine the photos that are being copied in here are probably from 2007 and older,” said data center Manager Chuck Goolsbee.
The company began saving the data in the facility in October of this year. So far, they have installed 15 towers which hold a petabyte of data. Goolsbee says that’s equivalent to two months’ worth of photos for the social networking giant’s 1.19 billion active users.
“A month and a half ago, we started moving data through them, and as those fill, we will add more and more, so we only right now have 15 racks,” Goolsbee said.
A unique feature about how your pictures are stored: The picture is broken into bytes, then spread across the servers. This helps, in case one of the drives fails — the photo is never lost.
“You can lose up to four full racks and not lose any real data, because you can rebuild it from the remaining 11 racks,” Goolsbee said.
Users have uploaded more than 250 billion photos — and each day, 350 million new photos are added.
