Huawei to Revolutionize Commercial Data Storage

Huawei has unveiled its OceanStor Arctic device, a first-of-its-kind magneto-electric drive for commercial data storage solutions.

• The OceanStor Arctic leverages magneto-electric disk (MED) technology.
• Huawei aims to reduce both cost and power consumption compared to traditional methods.
• the OceanStor Arctic targets the long-term archiving of infrequently accessed data.

Chinese tech company Huawei has announced its OceanStor Arctic device, a magneto-electric drive for secure data storage solutions.

Dr. Peter Zhou, President of Huawei Data Storage Product Line, introduced the innovative approach to data storage at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024 in Barcelona. It promises unparalleled density and efficiency.

The OceanStor Arctic is based on cutting-edge magneto-electric disk (MED) technology. Huawei has its money on the magneto-electric drive reducing both cost and power consumption compared to traditional methods.

The first generation of MED technology will have a storage capacity of 10 petabytes (PB). It will dwarf the capacity of current types of data storage, like hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). The largest commercially available HDD has a capacity of 30 terabytes (TB). Meanwhile, the largest commercially available SSD has a capacity of about 16 TB. Now, 1 PB is 1,024 TB, which means that the first generation of the OceanStor Arctic is equivalent to about 34 HDDs of 30 TB. That’s a little over 1,000 TB of pure data. And anyone familiar with tech will tell you that the first generation is just the beginning of a long journey. Look at Apple, its first-generation Macintosh, while revolutionary, is nowhere near as capable as its recent one.

As far as power consumption goes, this first generation is set to consume less than 2kW of power. Huawei claims that it uses up to 70% less power compared to traditional HDD-based commercial data storage solutions. Based on the available information, this is largely due to its intelligent power management system, optimizing energy consumption based on real-time requirements.

This new technology is mostly meant for cold storage. And no, I’m not talking about where your butcher keeps his meat. In the data storage field, cold storage refers to the long-term archiving of data that is infrequently accessed. That data is important and has several purposes, including regulatory compliance, historical purposes, or potential future use, but you don’t have immediate and frequent use for it. Think of it like a wine collector’s wine cellar. Is she drinking from every bottle every night? No. But she needs to keep her rare vintages appropriately stored so that when the need arises, she can pop the cork on that 1945 Château Mouton Rothschild.

Huawei believes it will internationally release the OceanStor Arctic drive in the first half of 2025.

This breakthrough, if proven fruitful, is amazing news for Huawei and by extension the Chinese government. but it may spell out trouble for the rest of the world, specifically the U.S. Let me explain.

In a previous article, I detailed how the U.S. sanctions will either force the target countries to unite or rely on themselves. Huawei did the latter. It was a hair short of blacklisted just because it was Chinese. This forced it to either shape up or get out of the race. Apparently, tech companies are tenacious because Huawei changed gears so fast that it’s not even funny. It went from a company that made Android phones, which triggered the U.S.’ paranoia, to a company that Nvidia NAMED as a direct rival. Talk about a comeback story. BlackBerry could never. This story is the absolute opposite of falling from grace.

Many expected Huawei to fail. Could it be that the reason they were wrong is that the U.S. sanctions and the difficult time the American government gave it actually pushed to excel? Perhaps, the U.S. and all its allies that have previously excluded and marginalized Huawei are responsible for the beast that is Huawei today.

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