There was an interesting presentation about the cold storage system used at Alibaba on openSUSE conf 15. Unfortunately the video isn't online yet, but they have

There was an interesting presentation about the cold storage system used at Alibaba on openSUSE conf 15. Unfortunately the video isn't online yet, but they have a system that allows them to turn off power to the cold storage servers and only wake the disks up on a monthly schedule. They also use erasure coding and have calculated that they won't have to replace any disks for 5 years if the MTBF numbers from the vendors are correct: https://events.opensuse.org/conference/osc15/proposal/556 https://events.opensuse.org/conference/osc15/proposal/556