In recent years, whether it is the unfair treatment encountered by enterprises and colleges, or the sudden change in the international situation, people have become more and more aware of the importance of scientific and technological self-reliance. In particular, the autonomous control of basic information technology plays the role of foundation in the entire digital economy building. Once at risk, the consequences are incalculable.
The three basic technologies of the information industry are storage, computing, and networking.
In terms of network, China has experienced the era of seven countries and eight systems of switches, and finally turned the tide and completed industrial autonomy. Nowadays, both fiber optics and 5G networks have become the pride of China. The core chip of computing technology is the most concerned scientific and technological field in the past two years, and its importance and development necessity can be said to be known to women and children.
Have you found that the last of the three areas we know about is storage? We use storage on PCs, mobile phones, and the cloud every day, but most people don't know anything about the development status and challenges of storage in China.
Just now, during the two sessions of the National People's Congress in 2022, Feng Dan, a deputy to the National People's Congress and dean of the School of Computer Science and Technology of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, put forward the "Proposal on Accelerating the Upgrading of the Advanced Storage Industry of Independent Innovation and Providing a Secure Warehouse for Digital China". Through this proposal, we can understand the development of China's storage industry and the sword of Damocles hanging above some ZB of Data in China.
If there are external risks such as storage outages, how should China respond?
If you don't want to wait until the problem breaks out and then think about making up for it, what can you do today?
Through the data presented in the Recommendations and the ideas illustrated, we can reconstruct a one-shot battle for Chinese storage – at a time when we are at risk, when we are facing an opportunity.
Qianjun: Storage cannot become the sword of Damocles in Chinese technology
There is a lot of data and the value of data, which has always been a matter of pride for Chinese technology. But if you consider that the data economy is built entirely on an unstable infrastructure supply chain, you may need to think twice.
According to data released by Gartner and other data institutions, the scale of China's storage industry will exceed 140 billion yuan in upstream chips and media in 2020, and midstream storage machines and downstream services will exceed 340 billion yuan. By 2025, the total direct investment in China's storage industry will exceed the trillion-level scale.
Matching the huge storage industry is the unprecedented amount of data in China. According to a report released by IDC, China's overall data volume will reach 48.6 ZB by 2025, accounting for 27.8% of the global data circle.
However, the storage industry of more than one trillion yuan, the world's largest data stock, is mostly based on products provided by two or three countries in the United States and Japan. At present, the storage used in the Chinese market is mainly mechanical hard disks, and Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba are the only three companies in the world that can provide mechanical hard disks. Two of these U.S. companies, Western Digital and Seagate, account for more than 80 percent of global mechanical hard drive sales. Behind such a situation, the entire industrial chain of mechanical hard disks is highly concentrated. Under the premise of the sustainable development of the digital economy, the diversified supply of storage and sustainable supply must be considered.
Friends who know about storage will know that the most widely used and most market-accepted storage medium outside of mechanical hard disks is flash memory media. SSDs based on flash media are recognized as the next generation of storage media that is ahead of HDDs in many ways; in data centers, all-flash storage systems are gradually replacing HDD storage systems. So can Chinese storage in this field sit back and relax?
Unfortunately not. Although the Chinese industrial chain has mastered the key technologies of all-flash storage systems, which can ensure the independent and controllable industrial supply in this field, the penetration rate of all-flash drives in China is very low because the price of flash drives is higher than that of mechanical hard disks. According to Gartner/IDC data, the proportion of all-flash memory in the United States has reached 56.4%, the global average is 41.3%, but China only has 20.3%. In particular, important industries related to the national economy and people's livelihood, such as government, communications, finance, etc., account for less than 15% of all-flash memory. Under the premise that the proportion of all-flash memory is relatively low, a large number of domestic all-flash products also rely on imports. For example, the 2020 data shows that 70% to 90% of all-flash products in key industries in the country rely on imports.
That is to say, once an extreme situation occurs, not only the lack of reliability of the mechanical hard disk, but also the all-flash memory will also have a major risk, and the current all-flash device will be difficult to expand and maintain. The domestic all-flash volume is not enough to support such a huge amount of data for migration, and China's data security is still a serious problem.
Mechanical hard disks are completely mastered by American companies, all-flash penetration is low, all-flash memory is highly dependent on imports, and it has become the sword of Damocles hanging above China's digital economy. It really feels like a thousand guns are in one shot.
Dean Feng Dan proposed to "accelerate the upgrading of the advanced storage industry of independent innovation" to see such an industrial security background. So is it possible that this situation could be changed and reversed?
The good thing is that there is.
The moment: the promotion of advanced storage, the time and place of the world and the world
Just like all technology industries promote autonomy, the autonomy and controllability of the storage industry needs to be considered as follows: Is there a product supply that can meet the requirements of autonomy? Does the replacement product have the same technical experience as the imported product? Will replacement lead to a cost spike for businesses and governments?
If you want to answer these questions, you must see the three elements of China's storage iteration and moving towards the autonomous and controllable "time, place, and people".
Tianshi: Advanced storage iteration is the trend of the times.
The core logic of the technology industry is that the old road does not stand in the way. If the company does not have the motivation to replace, it is difficult to force product replacement to last. However, just when the global supply chain began to tighten and the risk of technology supply interruption began to expand, China's storage industry ushered in a rare iteration opportunity: advanced storage arrived.
Dean Feng Dan believes that the so-called advanced storage contains two meanings, one is to meet the industrial upgrading of storage products, and the other is to have advanced technical advantages of storage products.
At present, from the perspective of the situation of China's storage industry, the definition of advanced storage can be met from both aspects. From the perspective of industrial demand, the prosperity of big data, the Internet, and AI technology has led to a data explosion, and the requirements for storage have become more and more stringent. Not only the expansion of the storage volume, but also the requirements for storage performance, efficiency, and disaster recovery and backup capabilities. This has led to high-speed iterations of storage market demand.
On the other hand, the current technical advantages of flash disks over mechanical hard disks are being fully released, especially for large-scale scenarios such as data centers and industrial storage, all-flash storage system replacement has become absolutely necessary. At the same time, new storage technologies such as the integration of storage and computing and distributed storage have emerged, resulting in an explosive period in the storage industry.
Not only have storage media undergone significant iterative changes, but the iterative effects of storage systems have continued to evolve. Chinese enterprises can already meet the needs of users with high performance, low latency, high elasticity and other systems, and provide safe, reliable, simple and efficient storage systems.
Combining the two, the emergence of a new generation of storage is already the trend of the times. This iterative cycle of the global technology industry is a great opportunity for China to improve storage security.
Geographical advantage: The supply and demand adaptation of China's storage industry is basically completed.
With the supply and demand opportunity in the industrial cycle, we also need to know whether the autonomous industry can seize this opportunity. At present, China's storage industry has mastered the core technology in the field of all-flash memory, and can continue to launch products with global competitiveness. Huawei, Inspur, Xinhuasan and other enterprises have formed a head leading effect and maintained sufficient competitiveness compared with overseas brands. In the fields of high-performance storage, data lakes, and hybrid storage, China's storage industry has a perfect product layout and industrial iteration capabilities.
China's storage industry is facing China's storage needs, and has basically completed the adaptation of supply and demand and the integration of the industrial chain. What is needed is promotion and promotion. Without waiting, you can quickly iterate most storage scenarios with low-cost advanced storage solutions, which is the "geographical advantage" of China's storage industry today.
People: The direction of industry, government, research and research is unified with the will of society.
Self-reliance in any field of science and technology is inseparable from the most vague but also the most real driving factor: the heart of the people.
For Chinese storage, replacement and iteration are indeed not overnight achievements. But today we have seen that this direction belongs to the unified will of the entire Chinese society, and it has a certain degree of irreversibility.
From the perspective of industry-university-research cooperation, the development of head storage brands, the improvement of the industrial chain, and the attention of major universities have promoted the continuous and sufficient cooperation between industry, education and research in this field. Joint laboratories in various fields have been completed, and new technical difficulties have been continuously overcome under the cooperation between industry and academia.
From the perspective of government and policy orientation, the replacement of advanced storage is in line with the national strategy of scientific and technological independence, and has an irreplaceable role in national data security and scientific and technological autonomy. At the same time, all-flash memory has obvious value in terms of energy consumption and environmental protection, which is in line with the country's "double carbon" development goals.
While the willingness of industry, politics, academia and research to develop is unified, we can see the ardent desire and ardent expectations of the overall Chinese society for scientific and technological independence and breaking through the "card neck". Such a willingness can promote the majority of enterprises and leading industries to take action to accelerate the completion of storage autonomous replacement and all-flash upgrades.
People and people are difficult to quantify, but people often have the greatest power.
Under such industrial situation and environmental factors, there is reason to believe that the next storage will break the silence and come to the front of the stage more clearly. It can be seen from the advanced storage proposal to land at the two sessions that the focus of the storage industry has increased. Facing the future, China has completed at least three major "acceleration" for advanced storage iterations.
Chimerism: The three major accelerations of Chinese storage
Overall, the core of the storage iteration is the device silicon entering and exiting, completing a large-scale all-flash replacement. To promote the rapid and accurate implementation of this action, it is necessary to promote a series of forces such as policy, market, and integration of industry, education and research. So where do these forces come from?
Fundamentally, the autonomous storage industry can be combined with the goals of the entire Development of China's digital economy, not only because of risks, but also because of demand. The replacement of autonomous storage is not fueled by seedlings, but is embedded with the diversification of the overall economic development, which can obtain dynamic support from all aspects.
Accelerate the pace of advanced storage R&D, production and application, and we can now see three major sources of acceleration. And these directions are precisely the mainstream of China's scientific and technological development today, and they are the centripetal force of social economy.
Acceleration one: the number of east and west is calculated, and the storage and calculation are required to be adapted.
East and West is the first explosive term of China's science and technology in 2022, and the core of the industry of this concept lies in the development and construction of new data centers. In the data center upgrade, the value of the storage upgrade is comparable to the computing upgrade, occupying half of the new data center. In the process of counting in the east and the west, whether it is the transformation and upgrading of data centers or the construction of new data centers, the storage and calculation system should be considered as a whole to avoid waste of resources. And should focus on the consideration of green environmental protection and safety and disaster recovery in data centers. In both respects, advanced storage has obvious technical advantages. According to relevant data, when the utilization rate of flash memory in the data center reaches more than 50%, the energy consumption of the data center can be greatly reduced. If the Chinese data center is completely replaced with flash memory media, the power generation of four Gezhou dams can be saved in one year.
The adaptation of memory and computing, the development of energy conservation and environmental protection in data centers, is one of the core ideas for the development of intensive computing in China in the future, and it is also the most important platform for the accelerated development of advanced storage.
Acceleration two: science and technology self-reliance, to promote the development of the local market.
The development goal and long-term strategic planning of scientific and technological independence will inevitably require the local market to establish a continuous diversified supply and reliable industrial chain, which will increase the efficiency of advanced deployment of independent controllable products and explore and set an example for the wider commercial market. The development of domestic advanced storage to today has basically mastered the core technologies required by the storage market and has been effectively verified by the market. Next, under the general trend of technological self-reliance, the commercial vitality of the storage market is increasing, which in turn is driving the data infrastructure of the entire society to accelerate the iteration of storage replacement.
Acceleration three: digital China, promote storage to empower thousands of industries.
The 14th Five-Year Plan clearly puts forward the construction goals and tasks of digital China, of which the use of a new generation of digital technology to empower the industry and activate the vitality of the real economy is the top priority. In this process, not only 5G and AI can play a driving role, but advanced storage can also improve industrial efficiency and promote the development of industry productivity. Especially in the fields of government, finance, energy, and scientific research, advanced storage not only has obvious security advantages, but also provides key support in terms of efficiency, disaster recovery, and big data adaptation. In an industrial space like autonomous driving, a test vehicle generates massive amounts of data every day. The effective learning and utilization of these data is inseparable from the support of data lake products.
Next, with the continuous development of digital China construction, key industries and key units may formulate a full range of advanced storage requirements to promote equipment replacement. Subsequently, the value of advanced storage can also penetrate into the broader industrial market through digital scenarios, and generally promote the digital construction of thousands of industries.
The advanced storage industry system that is independent and controllable and can develop for a long time will not only help to solve the immediate needs, but also be of great significance to grasp the historical opportunities of a new round of scientific and technological revolution.
This is a critical juncture for Chinese storage, and it is also the biggest opportunity for Chinese storage.
We have no reason to remain silent, because there is thunder in the chest.