In this piece we talk about Huawei’s innovative response to trade restrictions as well as some updates on leadership at the two companies that will result with the breakup of WDC’s hard disk drive and NAND flash business.
Trade restrictions can have unexpected consequences. At the 2024 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona I had a chance to visit Huawei and see consumer, telecom and enterprise solutions from the company. In the consumer products they spoke to me about moving their mobile devices to their own operating systems and off of Android, because of those restrictions.
Another interesting and related development is that Huawei said they can’t get the latest hard disk drives, many of which are made by US-based companies Seagate and Western Digital. As a consequence, they were announcing OceanProtect all flash backup appliances and a new storage device (magneto-electric storage) tied to their archive storage solution, Oceanstor Arctic. The all flash backup appliances were the OceanProtect X9000 for high-performance backup and the OceanProtect E8000 for high-capacity backup. I expect that the flash memory used in Huawei products come out of China.
In their media event Huawei spoke about their expectations for solid state storage (SSDs) saying that they can get 30TB SSDs now but that 60TB SSDs will be available by the second half (of 2024). The company says that it is developing a technology (perhaps with more flash die in an SSD) that allows scaling to 512TB.
The Magneto-electric disk is shown below with a Magneto-electric storage enclosure that is part of the OceanStor Arctic (a rack-based solution). Huawei says that the magneto-electric storage solution reduces TCO by 20% compared to tapes and power consumption by 90% compared to HDDs.
I was told that the Huawei Magneto-electric Disk was a combination of magnetic tape and flash memory and perhaps the Magneto-electric Storage either contains drives for reading the tape in the Magneto-electric disk or read and write capability is built into the Magneto-electric Disk. The image above says it is robot free, so this isn’t a library system. Performance is listed at 8GBs per rack and storage capacity is 72TB per disk with energy consumption of 71W/PB.
In a press release on March 5 Western Digital gave updates on its plant to separate into two independent, publicly traded companies. This breakup is scheduled for happening in the second half of calendar year 2024. WDC says that they are establishing legal entities for the new companies, working on government filings (SEC and IRS), leadership appointments for both the HDD and Flash companies and working on customer and supplier contract transfers post-separation.
Of interest in the announcement is that David Goeckeler, CEO of WD will become the CEO of the Flash spinout company. Irving Tan, currently Executive Vice President, Global Operations at WD, will become the CEO of the remaining standalone HDD company, which will continue to operate as Western Digital.
Huawei develops storage solutions to get around trade restrictions preventing access to hard disk drives. Western Digital provides insights into leadership of the two companies resulting from the breakup of its hard disk drive and NAND flash business.