Bottom line: Huawei was severely impacted by US sanctions against technology exports to China, but the company is far from finished. Its engineers are apparently working on a new type of storage technology, an innovative medium that could theoretically offer significant improvements over traditional tape or hard disk-based devices.
Huawei, unable to procure the latest hard disk technology for its storage needs due to sanctions, has opted to develop its own archival-grade media tech. The Chinese company is working on "magneto-electrical disks" (MED) for its OceanStor Arctic rack-based storage solution set to debut by 2025.
According to Huawei, the new MED technology promises significant, perhaps unprecedented, improvements over traditional archival storage media, hard disks, or tapes. Described as reliable, efficient, and cost-effective, MED media operate in a "robot-free" environment and are highly adaptable, featuring sealed disks suitable for standard data centers.
The MED technology appears to combine elements of magnetic tape and flash memory chips, offering read and write capabilities within each "disk." However, Huawei has yet to divulge detailed workings of the technology. The company has only mentioned that MED disks consume 71W of power per petabyte, providing an impressive 90 percent energy saving compared to magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs).
Expected MED performance is 8GB/s per rack, according to Huawei, marking a 2.5x increase over the maximum performance of archival tape units. Data centers could experience 90 percent faster data migration when replacing a tape library, with total cost of ownership (TCO) projected to decrease by an impressive 20 percent.
Huawei's new MED storage appears almost too good to be true. The first-generation MED units are expected to offer a capacity of around 24 terabytes per "disk," allowing a rack system to accumulate over 10 petabytes while consuming just 2KW of power.
OceanStor Arctic storage devices utilizing the new MED technology are anticipated to debut outside China by the second half of 2025, though pricing details have yet to be disclosed. When pressed for additional information, Huawei declined to share any new details until the MED drives become available in overseas markets.
