"Facebook handles photos and videos differently. For
photos, Facebook uses NFS and NetApp SATA drives, because of
NetApp's ability to store a large amount of objects within a single
container. Increasingly, however, as the number of photos stored on
Facebook has grown, the NetApp system has been overwhelmed with
metadata, causing a bandwidth bottleneck.
"So later this year, Facebook plans to roll out its own
objectstore called "Haystack," which the company describes as "a
user level abstraction where lots of data is stored in a single
file" (similar to a LUN).
"Facebook also uses NFS for videos, "because we have many
machines that need to access the same data within the tier, and
that was the most cost-effective and high-performance way to do
it," said Nagwani, as well as Isilon's clustered storage system.
But Nagwani and his team are actively looking into other platforms,
like the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System, which can scale
up to 576 TB."
