The information industry, driven by innovative technologies transforming everything from the support system to the production system, stands at the center of socio-economic development across the globe.
By: An Jian, President of Carrier Networks Business Group, Huawei Middle East
The information industry, driven by innovative technologies transforming everything from the support system to the production system, stands at the center of socio-economic development across the globe. In particular, the storage systems that allow businesses to house, share and safeguard data plays a major role in information lifecycle management; and it is also experiencing tremendous change. The past decade has seen the rapid rise of flash media, and the incredible capacity expansion of a single device from hundreds of GBs to tens of TBs. Over the past few years though, we have witnessed the rise of all-flash array (AFA) storage systems. As the price of flash storage continues to decline, we can expect AFA to continuously expand its share in data centers. Currently, more and more carriers have invested in AFA Storage to support their core IT applications.Long-term Efforts for Harnessing Flash
Huawei believes that today’s storage vendors must still make long-term efforts in order to provide the best possible flash capabilities, and there is now a clear path for moving forward. For one, performance of the array is key focus area, and the response time (latency), stability and efficiency also play vital roles. A great leap in performance is now possible through tight integration between homegrown controller chips (Hi Silicon) in SSDs, intelligent controllers, and the operating code. The outstanding performance benchmarking results for Huawei’s Hi Silicon chips of over 7 Million IOPs—done by vendor neutral agency ‘Storage Performance Council’—shows our commitment to customers and the advancements that are possible today. In addition, Huawei was the first in the industry to offer NVMe over all series of all-flash array models, reducing the latency to 0.3 milliseconds. The new generation of our Storage Class Memory (SCM) will reduce the media latency even further to within a few microseconds. The stability of the array is also a concern. This is particularly evident in high capacity SSD scenarios where the tolerance of dual disks failure is not adequate to protect one’s business data. This is why many organizations are turning to Triple Parity RAID technology from Huawei (RAID TP), which can withstand simultaneous three disks failures with the fastest data rebuilding techniques in the industry. We also recognize that a six nines (99.9999) availability is a requirement to run business critical workloads nowadays. The simplified gateway and free active-active solution capability of Huawei storage systems helps our customers to achieve this balance of the workload across two data centers. Closely related to this is the need for improved data protection techniques. Many innovations have been made in this area. For example, Cloud Backup/DR ensures lower costs with the help of cloud, and the Copy Data Management (CDM) emphasizes the management, migration and reuse of data copies, improving traditional backup system capabilities. Ultra-high density snapshots (completed in seconds) can also now compress intervals and increase the number of snapshots to provide improved levels of data protection. Huawei is proud to have worked with Orange Jordan in 2018 to build a LBS (location-based service) which greatly improved the end users experience in the Kingdome. Muhannad Abu Maizer, CIO of Orange Jordan said: “Huawei all-flash Storage helps Orange meet future service development requirements and achieve efficient services, we believe that our cooperation with Huawei will be a big success.”Integrating Flash with AI, Blockchain
In addition to the aforementioned innovations on flash storage, there are new technical developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain that may affect the future of data storage. AI has been a hot topic in the industry in recent years, and storage is also making use of AI. Multiple vendors, including Huawei, have deployed AI-based storage O&M systems to predict faults, locate problems, analyze performance and capacity trends, and provide the system health status, greatly reducing O&M costs. However, this is just the beginning. AI will be further applied to storage, such as for intelligent identification service workloads and the dynamic adjustment of storage system parameters such as cache prefetch, disk selection algorithms, and deduplication algorithms providing optimal system capabilities. Compared with AI, the deployment of blockchain in storage is still in the very early stages. Blockchain is characterized by non-repudiation, and therefore a possible application mode is to use this technology to implement trusted storage systems, where all user logs, operation records, and even data are verified and traceable. Bearing in mind all of these technological advancements, Huawei is committed to evolving in step with our customers. Our storage solutions will continue to uphold our belief in “Data on Demand” and provide customers higher-quality and advanced storage systems with easy data management capabilities in this new era.
