Big Data "Chain Detonating" Storage Demand: Multi Media Integration And Symbiosis

In the context of new infrastructure development represented by 5g, and the emergence of new crown pneumonia epidemic, the era of data explosion is approaching.

Of course, behind the explosion of data, in fact, only a very small part of it is stored and continues to be used. At the recent 9th China electronic information Expo (cite2021 for short), Liu Gang, vice president of Western data and general manager of China business, pointed out that in 2024, 143zb data will be generated globally, of which 36zb will be generated in China, but only less than 1.5% of the data will be stored.

"Distributed storage, hierarchical storage, and partitioned storage will enable data to get better value play, which is an important" three points "of innovative storage architecture Liu Gang told the 21st century economic reporter.

Especially in the context of the shortage of upstream components this year, it also forces the capacity of the entire industrial chain to be preposed and aggregated, and the technology can be implemented into the application scenarios more quickly.

Data itself is divided into hot data, temperature data, cold data and other types by the industry due to its different call frequency. It needs to be supported by memory products from different media, including magnetoelectric, optical and other media. More yuan industrial ecology is forming.

Storage demand blowout

The explosion of storage demand does not come from the one-way dimension of individual or enterprise level, but spiral. Especially in the era of short video, the storage demand of the consumer side increases greatly, which leads to the surge of demand for cloud, and then brings the growth of enterprise level storage business.

"Big data storage represented by HDD (mechanical hard disk) is expected to grow to 1.62zb, with an annual growth rate of about 30% from now to 2024; fast data storage based on SSD (solid state disk) is expected to reach 333eb by 2024, with an annual growth rate of about 50% Liu Gang analyzed.

He pointed out to reporters that there had been views on the market before that the growth of flash memory will replace the demand of original mechanical hard disk. Only from the perspective of consumer products, there is a trend, solid-state disk is gradually replacing mechanical hard disk. However, enterprise storage needs both big data and fast data, so in enterprise data center storage, mechanical hard disk and flash memory are growing rapidly.

"The demand for storage market is booming. In addition to the storage demand of cloud service providers, we find that there are still some new service providers emerging, such as IPFs (a kind of distributed storage). So in our view, this growth will be a long-term, sustained trend. " Liu Gang further analyzed that it was this rapid growth that led to the shortage of flash memory demand in some areas to a certain extent.

The general shortage of upstream components, which has spread since last year, is another macro background, which intensifies the collaborative process between downstream manufacturers and upstream component suppliers.

Liu Gang told the 21st century economic news reporter that as the original storage factory, western data had discussed cooperation with channels and equipment manufacturers, that is, how to integrate the company's products into the former system, but the use scenarios at that time were not refined enough.

"Now we will go one step further, closer to enterprise users or cloud service providers, and even to key software solution providers in the industry. We started from just providing components of the equipment manufacturers, began to be closer to end-user needs, and cooperate with relevant software companies He continued.

Under the influence of multiple factors, the domestic downstream manufacturers are also forced to optimize their demand planning ability and strengthen the linkage ability with the upstream industrial chain, so as to face the current common core shortage problem relatively calmly.

"We find that (downstream) customers will improve their supply and delivery capabilities and make longer-term and more specific plans after being tested in the supply side." Liu Gang believes that in other words, the problems faced by the industry today are actually optimizing the management ability among industries.

In the face of today's supply shortage, Liu Gang told the 21st century economic report that the western data had been prepared in advance. Last year, Shengdi semiconductor (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of the company, expanded the third phase plant of Shanghai factory and established a laboratory in Shanghai, "all of which are aimed at expanding the advanced product manufacturing facilities and product centered technology research and development of Western data, so as to support potential capacity expansion."

Technology is also evolving synchronously, with the aim of achieving larger NAND flash memory capacity with fewer stack layers and smaller wafer volume. "To sum up, users need not only large capacity and fast access, but also low cost and low power consumption." But in fact, it is difficult to find a storage medium and storage device that can meet the four requirements at the same time, he pointed out. However, the innovation of storage architecture may meet the needs of users for various storage scenarios.

Mixed emergence of multiple technologies

Huge technologies are actually divided into different types. Some data that need to be called quickly are called "hot data", such as the scene where the highway and other fast-moving industries need to carry out real-time calculation. However, there are also a large amount of data collected, which are only stored and not used repeatedly, such as the archives of public institutions such as hospitals, which are called "cold data".

Different types of data have different requirements for capacity and storage time, which also makes the market coexist with more storage technologies and media.

Jiang Zishan, director of Amethyst storage marketing department, introduced to the reporter that, in contrast, electric storage has high-performance characteristics, which is also the most concerned and fastest-growing field in the storage industry. Domestic enterprises are constantly breaking through this. The problem of this type of storage is that in the era of big data + 5g, the speed of data circulation is accelerated, and SSD is the first choice for data centers to meet the 5g transmission requirements.

SSD has its limitations. The amount of data generated by continuous circulation is huge, so that many data do not need to be read and called frequently after a circulation, but become long-term and reliable information to be stored. For this kind of data, it is more suitable to use another kind of storage medium, namely, the optical storage field of Amethyst storage focusing.

"Optical storage has many advantages. After a high-capacity Blu ray disc is written, the data is recorded on the disc medium. Because such data records cannot be tampered with at the physical level, it can realize the safe storage of data. At the same time, the blue light medium has very low environmental requirements, so it has a long storage life. Generally speaking, the storage cycle of disk and flash disk is about 5-10 years, which means that the data center using these storage will have to replace the media once in 5-10 years. However, the current effective storage period of optical storage can reach 50 years, and it can be further extended in the future. " He continued.

In addition, according to Jiang Zishan, the energy consumption of traditional data centers is large. For example, in 2017, the total energy consumption of China's data centers even exceeded that of the Three Gorges and Gezhouba hydropower stations. "Energy consumption is a problem that must be faced after the data explosion in the future." Compared with traditional storage media, the energy consumption of optical storage devices is much lower.

Under the background of independent innovation, it is an important step to reserve the core technology in the storage field. From the perspective of underlying technology reserve, the core technology of disk mainly comes from Europe and the United States, while the core of flash technology is in Europe and America and Japan. In the field of optical storage, China has achieved core technology control at all stages of the industrial chain and participated in the formulation of international standards. At present, Amethyst storage also realizes the core technology of optical storage bottom media, hardware equipment, software and solutions.

Western data focuses on the innovation of architecture, aiming at the "three points" principle mentioned above, it is continuously evolving. Liu Gang introduced that the storage architecture includes centralized cloud storage and decentralized distributed storage. The current solutions such as Web3.0 and IPFs are decentralized distributed storage. Compared with cloud storage, it is possible to reduce costs through new storage architecture.

He pointed out that compared with cloud storage, IPFs service providers are evolving at a faster speed. In the past four quarters, IPFs service providers have almost completed the evolution process of hard disks of cloud service providers in the past four years, from 8t to 18t.

"In summary, for the infrastructure architecture of Web3.0 or IPFs and its storage cluster, we have high-density disk expansion cabinet, large capacity 18t hard disk, etc Liu said.

The extension of technology is not limited to single storage media itself. It is introduced that promoting hybrid storage solution is a focus of Amethyst storage at this stage.

"At present, the industry is classifying the storage time and calling of data to do hierarchical management." Jiang Zishan introduced that different types of data will be stored on different storage media, which requires the integration of storage technologies of different media such as Blu ray, magnetoelectric and so on. "For Amethyst storage, more revenue will come from solutions and data centers in the future. We not only sell optical disks, storage servers, but also make the stored data generate value. On the one hand, we should strengthen the investment in integrated all-in-one computers and more compact industrial data operation and management solutions; at the same time, we should strengthen cooperation with various users, for example, various public institutions will have huge data generation and long-term preservation needs. "

After Blu ray storage, the common trend of the industry is to explore and develop holographic optical storage technology. Jiang Zishan told reporters that this includes two levels: on the one hand, the company is jointly arranging the research and development of coaxial holographic optical storage equipment with Fujian Normal University and other institutions to maintain the international advanced development level; on the other hand, it is simultaneously promoting the technical research and application exploration of holographic optical storage media, with the goal of achieving the future holographic storage technology route, storage medium and storage equipment You can control everything in your own hands.

"The biggest change in the so-called holographic optical storage is to change the reading information density of optical signals from two-dimensional to three-dimensional. In the past, each point of the CD reads two-dimensional information, but now it can map out a three-dimensional image through holography, and a lot of information can be stored. This development will drive the capacity of storage media to grow geometrically. " He explained to 21st century economic reporter that holographic storage is still far from practical application, and the company will continue to pay attention to and invest in research and development.