HUAWEI may become the first to deploy a magneto-electric disk in the market. MED can cut down power consumption and physical space requirements of servers.
In the advent of the AI era, HUAWEI is already poised as a frontrunner in AI storage solutions. The company unveiled its storage solutions during MWC 2024 Barcelona, including the mysterious OceanStor Arctic.
The OceanStor Arctic is a magneto-electric disk (MED), not a magneto-electric drive. HUAWEI may be the first to introduce this storage solution in the market.
While MED is amazing, HUAWEI said little about it in terms of specifications and whatnot. But MED can go beyond 10PB (petabyte), which is 1,000 times larger than a terabyte, at a power consumption of less than 2kW.
The same tech can cut down the total connection cost by 20%, compared to tape storage, and lower power consumption by 90% than typical hard drives. MED will definitely change the storage management for big data often used in AI, machine learning, research, and others.
For comparison, you can store up to 288 HDDs on a 42U rack and that’s equivalent to 8.64PB of data, if they come with heat-assisted magnetic recording. That rack consumes a power of 2.88kW if each HDD consumes 10W.
Although HUAWEI’s tech may not match the storage capacity of other storage server setups, those racks will need more power. That’s one major advantage of the brand’s innovative approach.
Plus, HUAWEI’s MED tech is likely to enable a connection between the magnetic and electric properties of a material.
OceanStor Arctic is scheduled for global rollout in the first half of 2025.
