Huawei Storage could not have accomplished its achievements today without going through various struggles and setbacks over the past 17 years. Let’s look at how Huawei Storage evolved.
Huawei Storage Has an Established Position in the Market
Since starting storage technology research in 2002, Huawei has built storage Research and Development (R&D) offices around the world. Huawei’s Silicon Valley office is the locus of its storage technology research, with a storage algorithm research center in Russia, delivery competence centers in Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Beijing — all contribute to the improvements of technology innovation and core competitiveness.
For many companies and Huawei alike, R&D capabilities are extremely difficult to establish and, once acquired, will lead the company to greater success. Huawei Storage develops rapidly based on its increasing R&D capabilities and core competitiveness. As of 2018, Huawei Storage has provided products and services for over 9,000 customers in more than 150 countries. Huawei Storage has ranked first in terms of market share in China for four consecutive years, and first in terms of revenue growth worldwide for five consecutive years. In 2018, Huawei was recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays for the third year in a row.
Everyone has the experience of climbing. On your way up, the steep path and thick undergrowth intimidate you, making you think about giving up. But when you are at the peak, these difficulties seem so insignificant. Likewise, looking back on its course of development, Huawei Storage is proud of what they have accomplished and confident about the next peak they are about to conquer.
Everything goes as planned with Huawei Storage today. According to the latest report for Q4 2018, Huawei storage ranks No. 1 in China in terms of revenue and shipment. Huawei’s all-flash storage ranks first worldwide in terms of revenue growth rate (Gartner Q3 2018 report). The latest IDC report shows that Huawei’s hyper-converged infrastructure FusionCube and desktop cloud FusionAccess are the leaders in their respective sub-markets in China, due to their excellent technology and market performance. Huawei is the only Chinese vendor to be included (as a challenger, with FusionCube) in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure. Huawei Storage has gained its position in the global market with a wide range of products and solutions.
A Great Leap
The expansion of a product line and rapid growth of business are comparatively easy, as long as there is a correct strategy, sufficient investment, and long-term accumulation. However, the growth in size does not necessarily mean that a vendor will lead the market and trends. Behind each big leap, there is long-term continuous preparation.
Today, Huawei Storage has become a pioneer in the storage market, not only with impressive business data, but also with forward-looking ideas, leading technology innovation, and unique insights into the future development of storage.
During this time of digital transformation, Huawei Storage firmly adheres to two core ideas: “customer-centered” and “data-based”, upon which the goal is to deliver “Data on Demand” services.
After decades of development, the storage industry has offered various storage products to fulfill various requirements of enterprise applications. Some iconic products have emerged in different historical stages. For example, Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) products are developed to address data growth; high-end storage is launched to provide the stability and performance required by mission-critical applications; Network Attached Storage (NAS) and object storage are introduced to process unstructured data; and software-defined storage is derived for elastic deployment.
Driven by emerging technologies such as cloud computing, big data, mobile computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), storage form and architecture may change in a disruptive manner to better match the needs of enterprise digital transformation. No matter how storage changes, the premise remains: data is the most important asset of the enterprise. Only storage that can solve data problems can be called good storage.
Huawei Storage believes that the following three bottlenecks must be alleviated during storage development:
First, the age-old storage silo problem. From early days of network storage, we have been talking about storage silos. Today, we are still trying to eliminate isolated data silos. Data is distributed in various storage devices and cannot be easily shared and moved to the required locations, impeding service flow integration, big data analysis, and data value mining. Storage resources are also poorly utilized due to existence of silos.
Second, storage management complexity. Current storage products support reads and writes of various data formats and provide various data protection functions. However, complex storage configuration still requires professionals. Worse still, data centers have been running on devices from different vendors for a long time. Unable to be managed in a unified manner, these devices further intensify management complexity.
Last but not least, vendor lock-in. Storage products from different vendors lack a unified standard. Once a storage vendor is chosen, the customer has to turn to that vendor for help when they need to expand capacity.
So who can break the aforementioned “three big chains” and reduce the burden for enterprises? Huawei Storage provides a powerful tool — “Data on Demand” services. Developed for cloud data centers, the services help customers build a converged storage resource pool, consolidate storage infrastructure, and mask underlying product differences so that data can be transferred and shared between different applications. “Data on Demand” provides customers with automated, on-demand data services that deliver consistent experience on- and off-cloud, helping customers achieve an agile cloud transformation.
“Data on Demand” points out the essence of storage in the cloud era. It is the track along which Huawei Storage and even the entire storage industry develops.
2019: A Big Year for Huawei Storage
There are signs that 2019 will be a “big year” for Huawei Storage. China’s national strategy encourages the further development of “Internet +”, “Intelligent +”, and digital transformation technologies. As the core of digital infrastructure, storage will become the cornerstone for supporting and implementing various new technologies. In 2019, Huawei Storage will continue its efforts in technological innovation in hyper-convergence, all-flash storage, distributed storage, and high-end storage. Huawei will also strengthen joint innovation with partners and enhance services for industrial customers to lead storage innovations based on its current market leadership.
All-flash storage will be an important “battlefield.” According to Gartner, the era of all-flash data centers is coming. In 2017, the entire all-flash storage market grew by 36 percent, reaching US$6.3 billion. The growth was accompanied by a drop in price, which has decreased by at least 40 percent in the past 18 months. Adding to the fuel is an ever-growing application ecosystem, which further unleashes the value of all-flash storage to data centers. Gartner predicts that 50 percent of traditional disk storage in data centers will be replaced by all-flash storage by 2020.
All-flash storage has become one of Huawei’s golden products. Now about 60 percent of Huawei storage systems shipped to Europe are all-flash arrays. Huawei has been promoting the application of all-flash storage since last year, and its efforts have yielded satisfactory results: top 12 banks and top 4 insurance companies in China are users of all-flash storage. Huawei’s all-flash storage systems carry core services such as databases, credit card services, and online transactions in medium- and large-sized commercial banks. For example, the all-flash solution delivered to China Life not only resolves their service issues, but also supports multiple services at the same time, delivering a tripled response speed and a 75 percent Operating Expense (OPEX) reduction (over a three-year period). Better still, the solution boasts flexible adaptability to China Life’s subsequent service development, upgradable to a geologically redundant three data center (3DC) solution. Since its adoption by China Life in 2015, the solution has been delivering a 99.9999 percent high availability.
Huawei is the first vendor who provides mid-range and high-end all-flash storage systems (such as OceanStor Dorado5000 V3 and Dorado6000 V3) based on the Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) architecture. As the fastest all-flash storage in the industry, these systems provide a latency of just 0.3 milliseconds, lowest in the industry. Counting from the launch of generation-one Huawei-developed solid state drives (SSDs) in 2005, Huawei has accumulated over 14 years of all-flash technology and grown to be the only storage vendor who has developed its own SSDs, controller chips, and all-flash storage operating systems.
Intelligent storage is another focus of Huawei Storage. Huawei has attached great importance to storage intelligence continuously since the release of the OceanStor V5 series. Huawei’s smart all-flash arrays use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data to reform their storage management mode, based on the self-developed eService intelligent cloud management platform, Huawei Storage’s global connectivity, and HUAWEI CLOUD’s Enterprise Intelligence (EI) deep learning capabilities. The storage systems can be quickly deployed based upon an intelligent service model, predict performance and capacity bottlenecks in advance, and carry out optimizations automatically. In addition, a Smart software suite is available to improve storage efficiency and management. With the deep integration of AI technologies, Huawei will further improve its all-flash intelligence.
Huawei Storage follows a balanced development strategy. In addition to all-flash storage and intelligent storage, Huawei Storage is also pushing hyper-convergence, cloud storage, distributed storage, backup, and disaster recovery (DR) to new limits, as widely recognized by customers. For example, Huawei helped China Mobile (Liaoning) migrate Billing, business analysis, and B2B systems from legacy storage to Huawei’s FusionStorage based on active-active storage (HyperMetro), writable snapshot (HyperSnap), and end-to-end DIF features. Based on a brand new storage architecture, China Mobile (Liaoning) has been enjoying 24/7 smooth service running and flexible data sharing since the migration.
As for storage media, Huawei Storage will continue improving its SSD controller and try to make more innovations in quad-level cell (QLC) and storage class memory (SCM) in 2019 to give SSDs full play in different scenarios. Huawei Storage plans to launch a brand new storage architecture oriented to all-flash storage in the second half of 2019. This amazing architecture will push SSDs’ capabilities to new limits. Let’s stay tuned!
Source: Huawei Enterprise Blog
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