Huawei has a breakthrough 10 petabyte storage product – OceanStor Arctic uses exciting new technology that can beat tape AND hard drives
According to recent estimates, approximately 328.77 million terabytes of data are being created every day. Storing that data is a challenge, so it’s no wonder that a number of new high-capacity storage technologies are being introduced. In the past few months alone, we’ve reported on a 10,000TB ceramic cartridge, a 200TB optical drive, and Micron’s NVDRAM, which outperforms NAND-based SSDs in speed and durability.
During a keynote speech at MWC 2024, Dr. Huawei’s Peter Zhou highlights a number of new data storage solutions being introduced by the company. OceanStor A800 and OceanStor A310 are designed to “make AI training data visible, manageable and available globally, and improve data collection, preprocessing and training efficiency,” while OceanProtect E8000 and X9000 are data backup equipment solutions.
Perhaps the most exciting announcement concerns the company’s next-generation OceanStor Arctic magnetoelectric storage solution.
Capacity of more than 10 PB
While details about OceanStor Arctic are a bit vague at the moment, we know it is designed for warm and cold data. Huawei has also said that it is expected to reduce TCO by 20% compared to tape, and reduce energy consumption by 90% compared to hard drives.
Huawei’s Chinese headquarters have since provided some more details Blocks and files, “Huawei’s MED (magnetoelectric disk) brings brand new innovation against magnetic media. The first generation MED will be a high capacity drive. The rack capacity will be more than 10 PB and the power consumption will be less than 2 kW. For the first generation MED, we will mainly position it for archive storage.”
Tom’s hardware suggests that since the technology is a “magnetoelectric disk (MED), and not a magnetoelectric drive, we are dealing with something that has magnetic dishes with tracks (and probably rotates). The underlying principle of MED technology appears to be the magnetoelectric effect, which creates a link between the magnetic and electrical properties of a material.”
The first generation of the OceanStor Arctic is expected to be launched internationally in the first half of 2025.