Vinpower has long touted that archival is the long term direction for optical discs. So the recent press release from Panasonic, stating that it is teaming up with Facebook to create a long term storage solution, specifically for cold data, shouldn’t be a shock to anyone. Cold data essentially means older data that is very unlikely to need to be reviewed or quickly available, so it just sits there. Storage space on servers is critical, especially for extremely high data flow in applications like Facebook. So if you can offload a majority of the Cold Data, then it could free up a tremendous amount of valuable space for more recent relevant data.

Panasonic is taking the opportunity to announce at CES, a new disc-based technology called “FreezeRay”, a successor to the Blu-ray technology Panasonic helped invent with Sony and a host of other companies, which will store 100GB per disc, and which Facebook will use to archive terabytes of data (the “Freeze” part refers to putting data in deep storage — it’s meant for data that does not need to be accessed quickly, unlike, say, the data stored in a database running in flash memory). More importantly, the freeze-ray solution reduces data center operating costs and energy use with strong data integrity. By not having to maintain as much data, with the transference of cold data from the server to an optical disc, that’s less work for the servers to maintain and therefore less effort and energy that needs to be expelled to maintain data that no one is looking at on a regular or even semi-regular basis.

For more details about any of Vinpower’s extensive list of products, visit www.vinpowerdigital.com or contact a Vinpower representative in your area.