China’s largest tech company unveils plans to release a 128TB SSD next year, but won’t sell it to anyone. The record-breaking SSD will be used exclusively in its Exabyte-enabled OceanStor A800 products
Storage is a major concern for businesses that struggle to back up and manage all the data they generate β a situation not helped by the advent of generative AI, which has massively disrupted traditional storage solutions.
Huawei’s answer to this problem is its OceanStor A800 NAS device. Originally unveiled last year, Huawei properly showed it off to European journalists and partners at the recent Innovative Data Infrastructure (IDI) Forum 2024 in Berlin.
As we reported, the OceanStor A800 is capable of 24 million IOPS per controller enclosure, delivering ten times the performance of existing storage and ten times the data mobility. It supports bandwidth in PB/s and 100 million IOPS, and offers 99.9999% data reliability, according to Huawei.
Exclusively for OceanStor A800 NAS
For now, storage for the OceanStor A800 comes in the form of 30 and 50TB SSDs, but that will change when the company introduces a 128TB SSD next year. Huawei said its massive new internal drive, previously teased but officially unveiled at IDI Forum 2024, will consume β88% less storage space and 92% less energy than comparable vendors’ SSDs in storing every PB of data.β The exact identity of the peer vendor has not been disclosed.
Michael Fan, marketing vice president of data storage at Huawei, says Blocks and files these new SSDs βwill use a mix of TLC and QLC flash to optimize drive capacity and lifespan. They have a controller developed by Huawei and are available in U.2 and palm format.β The site also noted that βthe palm size is thinner than a U.2 SSD and can be longer or shorter than that size. It appears to be similar to the EDSFF E3.S format, but Huawei does not use EDSFF nomenclature.β
While Huawei hasn’t said too much about the 128TB SSDs, or the proprietary technology behind them, it seems likely that they will be used exclusively in its OceanStor A800 NAS device for now, although it is possible that these will become more widely available in the future will become. .