According to Chinese reports from November 10 and 11, Huawei is preparing to begin the trial commercial operation of a new data storage system on November 12 during an event in Guiyang, Guizhou Province. Since the event has not yet taken place as of the article's writing, this is an announced plan, and no performance metrics have been published yet.
The system is based on a device developed by Huawei itself, which is referred to in reports as a magneto-electric disk, abbreviated as MED. Huawei has not officially confirmed the English name for this device, so the abbreviation is used in the article as mentioned in the sources. The main difference lies in the data recording method: a traditional hard drive uses electric current to create a magnetic field that flips a bit, whereas the MED controls magnetization via an electric field.
Huawei's stated goal is to achieve a storage cost comparable to magnetic tape, while the data retrieval speed should approach that of a mechanical hard drive. The reports lack data on capacity, power, throughput, or cost.
The primary purpose of the system is to store so-called 'warm and cold' data, meaning information that is rarely requested but must be retained for a long time and can be recovered later. The reports list four scenarios for testing: large datasets, media archiving, backup and disaster recovery, and scientific research data. Huawei claims that this launch moves the technology from the laboratory verification stage to joint verification with customers in real-world conditions. Specific customers have not been named.
Context and comparison with existing solutions
First Financial, which reported this plan on November 10, describes the problem this system aims to solve. Tapes store data economically for many years and do not consume energy when idle; their physical isolation from networks helps protect backups from cyberattacks, but retrieving large amounts of data can take hours. Hard drives return data faster, but they require constant rotation, leading to continuous electricity and cooling costs.
This source also notes that Fujifilm announced on October 29 the expansion of tape cartridge production, and that major cloud service and data center operators are increasingly using tape storage.
Some aspects remain unknown: the disk form factor, the number of sites participating in the test, the duration of the testing, as well as the timeline or possibility of product release into general production. Furthermore, the reports do not specify whether the test is related to any particular artificial intelligence workload beyond dataset usage, and technical documentation has not been released.
