TStor, a reliable storage system developed by Tsinghua Tongfang Co Ltd, has won the 2016 Tsinghua Industries Top 10 Innovation Project award. 

The system, which has improved the use ratio of disk space to two thirds and has extended the special maintenance period for disks to a year, can ensure data integrity and smooth service even in cases of temporary blackout or computer damage.

"There's no company that can achieve this result except Tongfang," said Liu Feng, head of the company's TStor storage system division. 

TStor storage system are entirely domestically designed, including all the components ranging from instructions set to CPU, operating system, and core algorithm. In addition to better performance in terms of speed, efficiency and reliability, TStor can store several hundred PB (1PB is around 1000TB) of information and only requires maintenance once a year. It costs only half or less than a half of the international suppliers. 

Currently, two ways are commonly adopted to deal with large-scale data storage. One is the large disc array system, which is used in areas of high-level security and reliability, such as finance and communication. 

However, the system is too expensive and requires frequent maintenance. What's worse is that the technology has been exclusive to foreign companies, such as IBM, Hitachi and EMC, and is thus not safe for domestic data storage. 

The other way is the distributed network filing system based on duplication technology. It can be used for companies with lower data security requirements. It's efficient, relatively cheap, and able to allow users not to be subject to equipment suppliers. 

But the system can only use 33 percent of the disk room and once a problem occurs in the same place on duplications, the data disappears for good. 

For years, there were no suitable storage solutions which could ensure high-level data security and low-frequency maintenance at low cost. 

Inspired by the erasure coding applied on submarines, Tongfang invented the TStor storage system, which can protect data security and continue operations even in blackout or disk damage situations.

The erasure coding is the technology that submarines adopt to transfer information. It is a method of data protection in which data is broken into fragments, expanded and encoded with redundant data pieces and stored across a set of different locations or storage media. 

To make the theory a real storage system, Tongfang also designed the computer programs, conducted compiling, adjusted the register, wrote the instructions for accessing memory and optimized the local balance among network, computing, memory and hard disk. 

"We had to solve all the problems by ourselves for safety," Liu said, as he explained that domestic storage technology and programmers' skills were far behind the international level at that time.

As of now, TStor is a success and a spur for China's storage industry to stimulate more valuable contributions, benefiting from the efforts made by the Joint Research for Computer Architecture (JCCA) co-founded by Tsinghua University and Tongfang in 2015. 

Statistics show that by the end of 2020, information storage in China will have reached 8.8ZB, 10 times more than the total number of sand grains around the world. Tongfang, with its constant efforts, is developing itself into a miracle-maker in the storage industry.