Panasonic and Facebook partner to develop freeze-ray optical disc technology

Panasonic has developed freeze-ray, an optical disc-based data archive system, in collaboration with Facebook.

Panasonic designed freeze-ray to meet the demand for efficient and sustainable ways to store and access cold data – infrequently accessed data stored for the long term – in data centres.

The freeze-ray solution reduces data centre operating costs and energy use.

This data archiving solution provides optimal cold storage for protecting data integrity and reducing costs in data centres thanks to the characteristics of optical discs, including their longevity, low power consumption, and tolerance to environmental changes.

Panasonic and Facebook have been working on two generations of the freeze-ray solution, with Facebook deploying the first-generation 100GB Blu-ray disc-based archive system into its data centres.

It expects deployment of the second-generation 300GB disc-based archive system later in 2016.

The two companies plan develop 500GB and 1TB archival discs.

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