According to recent estimates, around 328.77 million terabytes of data are created each day. Storing that data is a challenge, so it’s no wonder that we’re seeing a number of new high-capacity storage technologies being introduced. In the past few months alone we’ve reported on a ceramic cartridge with a 10,000TB capacity, a 200TB optical disc, and Micron’s NVDRAM, which outperforms NAND-based SSDs in terms of speed and durability.
At a keynote speech at MWC 2024, Huawei’s Dr. Peter Zhou took the wraps off a number of new data storage solutions being introduced by the company. OceanStor A800 and OceanStor A310 are designed to make “AI training data globally visible, manageable, and available, and improves data collection, preprocessing, and training efficiency”, while OceanProtect E8000 and X9000 are data backup appliance solutions.
Perhaps the most exciting announcement however, covers the company's next-gen OceanStor Arctic magneto-electric storage solution.
Over 10PB capacity
Although details on OceanStor Arctic are a little light at the moment, we know that it’s designed for warm and cold data. Huawei has also said that it is projected to reduce TCO by 20% compared to tape, and reduce power consumption by 90% compared to hard drives.
Huawei’s China HQ has since provided a little more detail, telling Blocks & Files, “Huawei’s MED (magneto-electric disk) brings brand-new innovation against magnetic media. The first generation of MED will be as a big capacity disk. The rack capacity will be more than 10 PB and power consumption less than 2 KW. For the first generation of MED, we will position it mainly for archival storage.”
Tom’s Hardware suggests that since the technology is a “magneto-electric disk (MED), not a magneto-electric drive, we are dealing with something that has magnetic platters with tracks (and probably spins). The underlying principle of MED technology seems to be the magneto-electric effect, which creates a connection between the magnetic and electric properties of a material.”
The first generation of the OceanStor Arctic is slated for international release in the first half of 2025.
