The Archival Disk standard was launched by Sony in 2014 as a tougher, higher capacity version of Blu-Ray. The total capacity of a single Everspan system can reach 181 Petabytes and up to four systems can be linked to offer 724 Petabytes of total addressable object storage. It consists of three types of units: the Base Unit, the Robotic Unit, and up to 14 Expansion Units, based on the ‘triplet’ rack developed by the OCP and containing up to 43,520 Archival Disks each.Īdditional Expansion Units can be deployed when needed, with a marginal increase in in space, power and cooling requirements. In March 2014, Frankovsky left the company to establish his own business called Optical Archive, which aimed to commercialize the technology and was promptly acquired by Sony.Įverspan is the first product from Optical Archive to hit the market.

The social network still uses a similar system to store rarely accessed images and videos, but currently has no plans to offer it as a commercial product under the auspices of the OCP. That’s a huge part of the TCO equation, because media makes up to 80 percent of any sort of storage solution, especially in archiving.”įrankovsky developed the ideas behind Everspan while serving as the vice president of Hardware Design and Supply Chain Operations at Facebook. And if there’s a fault in the first 100 years, we’ll replace it at our cost. And with our media, what we are saying is you don’t ever have to replace it for the first 100 years. “If your retention period for data is longer than the life of the media, you have to repurchase media after a certain period of time. The unusual appliance is the brainchild of Frank Frankovsky, former chair of the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP), who told DatacenterDynamics that Everspan can cut the costs of storing information over long periods of time thanks to both energy savings and the innate durability of Archival Discs. The Everspan Library System is best described as a modular jukebox that holds thousands of high capacity Archival Discs (ADs) and is operated by an autonomous robotic arm, capable of handling up to four dual-layer discs at a time. This week, Sony has launched a storage appliance that eschews traditional magnetic media like hard drives and tapes in favor of lasers and plastics.

Sony disk archive system