Due to export restrictions, Huawei has been forced to develop a weird hybrid SSD/tape storage drive for data archiving
When it comes to cheap but massive data storage, magnetic tape is still the favoured choice of data centre managers. But its very slow read speed isn't great if you need to grab data off it quickly. Huawei reckons it has the perfect solution with its magnetic-electric drives, combining a large SSD, twin tape spools and drivers, all in one handy unit.
China's burgeoning data centre market has been facing a problem regarding long-term data storage. US technology export restrictions have been making it increasingly difficult to get hold of disk and tape drives, so to ensure the sector has access to reliable data storage solutions, Huawei has developed a rather nifty hybrid system.
As reported by Blocks and Files (via ComputerBase), the so-called magnetic-electric drives (MEDs) combine an SSD and a full tape drive storage system in a single rackmount unit (rather than having the tapes and drives separate as shown at the top of this story).
Frequently accessed information, aka hot data, remains the preserve of normal enterprise drives, but Huawei's development is targeting the handling of warm and cold data—information that only needs to be accessed occasionally or just kept for archival purposes.
The way the setup works is that warm data is written to the SSD first and when it comes time to store it on the tape, the information is restructured into a large sequential block, making it much faster for writing. While accessing any cold data will still be just as slow as tape drives have always been, any warm data requests will be handled via the SSD and thus a whole lot speedier.
Sounds neat, yes? Well, I have a few concerns. While modern NAND flash memory cells are very reliable, that type of storage doesn't have anything like the same lifespan as magnetic tape does. That means there's a good chance that the MED becomes junk long before a normal tape drive would because the internal SSD has failed.
One way to mitigate this is to use an enormous SSD. The larger a NAND
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