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The proliferation of cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) AI for business, and the Internet of Things (IoT) has upended the traditional industries.

The digital wave continues to reshape our lives and work, ushering in new applications and economic shifts that prompt a departure from conventional business models and industrial structures. This paradigm shift becomes particularly pronounced with the emergence of transformative technologies such as all about cloud storage, cloud computing, AI for business, and the IoT.

During digital transformation, enterprises want to streamline all workloads, improve collaboration efficiency upstream and downstream, implement automatic and intelligent workload management, and build an intelligent collaboration platform. Data has become one of their most important assets.

As data volumes increase, enterprises not only need to efficiently and intelligently store and manage data throughout its entire lifecycle, they also need to extract potential value from of massive amounts of data using interactions and big data analytics. They also understand What’s a Cloud Application? | Cloud App Definition & Example.  Moreover, seamless system interconnections, rapid service Time-to-Market (TTM), and flexible scalability pose demanding requirements on traditional storage architectures in terms of resource utilization, elastic scaling, intelligence, and automation.

Intelligent Transformation of Traditional Storage

Enterprises usually purchase different storage devices for different applications and purchase different devices at different times, and this leads to numerous storage silos. Storage silos greatly complicate O&M and management and cause a costly waste of resources. All of this hinders enterprises’ efforts to digitalize all their workloads.

To effectively support ever-growing workloads, enterprises require unified, transparent monitoring and management of storage from different vendors and dynamic storage resource configuration based on the Service Level Agreement (SLA), in order to simplify heterogeneous storage management, implement intelligent, automatic management of storage resources, and achieve intelligent O&M by monitoring and warning the status of hardware devices. On top of intelligent heterogeneous storage management, enterprises also require global data resource sharing and a storage-based data analytics platform that allows them to unleash value of their data.

Emerging Internet and mobile applications can experience rapid growth and are updated frequently. To keep up with this pace, storage systems must be deployed within hours or days instead of weeks or months, and must be easy to deploy and capable of elastic scalability if they are to meet the needs of enterprises experiencing an explosion of data growth.

As data centers gradually evolve toward the cloud, hybrid cloud environments will become the new norm. Shifting from traditional storage device management to cloud storage service delivery becomes an important assessment factor by which enterprises evaluate storage technologies and solutions.

For all these reasons, enterprises need to formulate phased cloud storage planning, flexibly deploy cloud storage such as the best cloud storage for business, and implement unified and intelligent management of cloud storage to reliably support enterprise business in a cost-effective manner. An ideal cloud storage system can build open source private clouds, private clouds based on different levels of virtualization, multiple hybrid clouds, as well as interconnection with different public clouds.

What Is Cloud-Ready, AI-Ready Next-Gen Storage?

Do we have next-generation storage that can rise to the coming challenges presented by cloud and AI? Software-Defined Storage (SDS) points the way. According to Gartner, by 2020, 70 to 80 percent of unstructured data will be stored and managed in low-cost SDS environments.

SDS is growing in popularity, but it must be noted that it still lacks a generally accepted or standardized definition. This has led to many different understandings in the industry. Using traditional disks as an example, decoupling of software systems from the hardware systems was the direction the industry endorsed. So then, does this software mark the beginning of push toward SDS? There is no real consensus on this point. The common view is that SDS is limited to scale-out distributed storage that primarily uses general-purpose servers with an independent storage software suite. Using the local storage available on the servers helps build resource pools that are easy to share.

Distributed storage comes in many forms and product varieties, including Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI), Hypervisor-based SDS, Server SAN, distributed file-based storage, and distributed object storage.

Different forms of product modality mean different focuses. Although the methods used may vary, storage systems are designed to satisfy application requirements. Cloud computing is an important driver of sustained rapid development for enterprises. Newer forms of cloud applications emphasize resource sharing, flexibility, and on-demand scale-outs and scale-ins. These same concepts apply to SDS.

Many SDS products and solutions exist in the market to satisfy the various storage requirements of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. The uses cases are quite diverse. FusionStorage — Huawei’s distributed storage product — is perfectly geared toward the high scalability, performance, and compatibility requirements of cloud environments.

China Telecom (Zhejiang) constructed the first in-country petabyte-scale SDS resource pool built on Huawei FusionStorage. The solution has also been widely applied at many organizations deploying cloud applications, including China Merchants Bank (CMB), China Mobile (Liaoning), Deutsche Telekom, and Telefonica to name just a handful.

Back in 2013, Huawei started using FusionStorage to support the company’s three large cloud resource pools, which carry critical workloads for R&D, production, operations, and other activities. Deployment on such a large scale helped demonstrate the superior performance and reliability of the FusionStorage offering, and its ability to continuously satisfy mushrooming demands on capacity and performance.

The sheer complexity entailed in cloud applications in an intelligent world places much higher demands on the flexibility, efficiency, and ease of storage system use in the future. Equipping storage systems with the capability to deliver increased data agility across varying format types and improve data retrieval and management in cloud environments is precisely the role Huawei distributed storage was born to fulfill.

Source: Huawei Enterprise Blog
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Abstract: Nowadays, all-flash storage is one of the biggest driving forces in the data center market. Compared with the international market, China embraces stronger all-flash growth. According to 2018 Q3 statistics from IDC, the market share of China’s all-flash storage increased 208.2 percent over the same period in 2017.

In the past, flash memory replaced Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) at an unexpectedly slow pace. Now, Gartner predicts that 50 percent of HDD storage in data centers will be replaced by all-flash storage by 2020.

Many facts show that Gartner’s prediction is slowly becoming a reality. All-flash storage is one of the biggest driving forces in the data center market. Compared with the international market, China embraces stronger all-flash growth. According to 2018 Q3 statistics from IDC, the market share of China’s all-flash storage increased 208.2 percent over the same period in 2017.

Huawei China Σco-Partner Conference 2019

Milestone Era for All-Flash Data Centers

At the Huawei China Σco-Partner Conference held in Fuzhou in 2019, Huawei’s all-flash storage family took the stage. Meng Guangbin, President of the Intelligent Storage & Data Management Domain, shared that with the absolute advantages of all-flash storage in performance, reliability, power consumption, and capacity, more customers have shifted toward flash memory. Consequently, Huawei will strive toward the construction of all-flash data centers.

Meng Guangbin, President of the Intelligent Storage & Data Management Domain, Huawei IT Product Line

As the main development direction, all-flash storage has become more popular in real-world applications. All-flash deployment has gradually shifted from the superb performance pyramid to many general-purpose applications. Along with its fast speed, all-flash storage also attracts users for its time-tested SSD reliability and features support.

Traditionally, the key advantage of HDD storage has been the capacity price. However, the price of flash memory has declined significantly in recent years. In the next 12 months, the performance of all-flash storage is expected to improve 10 times. In addition, the density will double, and the unit capacity price will be reduced by half. Meanwhile, new technologies such as NVMe and 3D XPoint are becoming mature. Software capabilities such as deduplication and compression are widely used, which further improves the utilization of all-flash storage. Enterprises, challenged with meeting the demands of high performance and capacity at affordable prices, will certainly be impressed by the cost-effective benefits of all-flash storage.

Undoubtedly, all-flash storage has reached a critical point in terms of reliability and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) that concern most enterprises.

AI Readiness

Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has become a hot topic in recent years, is also much-discussed in the storage industry. Many vendors, including Huawei, have deployed AI-based storage Operations and Maintenance (O&M) systems to predict and locate faults, analyze performance and capacity trends, and provide system health status. This greatly reduces the O&M costs.

Pang Xin, Vice President of the Intelligent Storage & Data Management Domain, said that many large enterprises complained most about O&M issues in communications. Users require fast service rollout and quick troubleshooting, while facing complex parameter configurations.

Pang Xin, Vice President of the Intelligent Storage & Data Management Domain, Huawei IT Product Line

Beginning with the launch of OceanStor V5, Huawei has kept its eyes on AI storage systems. Huawei’s all-flash storage integrates eService, Huawei’s intelligent cloud management platform. Leveraging global connectivity of Huawei storage and deep learning capabilities of HUAWEI CLOUD EI, Huawei upgrades the storage management mode though AI and big data. In this way, systems can be quickly deployed based on the intelligent service model to predict performance issues and anticipate capacity bottlenecks in advance, and implement automatic optimization.

In addition, Huawei develops Smart series software to improve storage utilization and management. With the development of AI technology, Huawei will improve its flash intelligence for more intelligent acceleration of devices. It will also implement simplified O&M on multiple devices.

Huawei has accumulated more than 14 years of all-flash experience since the first generation of self-developed SSDs were introduced in 2005. Huawei is the only storage vendor with self-developed SSDs, self-developed controller chips, and self-developed flash storage operating systems.

Huawei has spent many years maximizing SSD performance, increasing SSD service life, and reducing latency and jitter during SSD garbage collection to improve write performance. Huawei’s all-flash storage Dorado V3 uses FlashLink disk-controller collaboration technology to implement in-depth optimization of SSD system data layout and I/O scheduling. FlashLink provides end-to-end stability, low latency, and high performance. Further, after enabling value-added features — such as snapshots, deduplication and compression, and active-active — the performance of OceanStor Dorado V3 remains stable and much higher than that of competitors.

However, this is only a start. AI will be further applied to storage — such as intelligent workload identification and dynamic adjustment of system parameters — to provide optimal system capabilities. In addition, the intelligent algorithm automatically optimizes the data distribution mode in the storage system, saving network consumption and balancing system workloads. And Huawei will continue to make further progress in AI applications.

Huawei All-Flash Storage, Ideal for Financial Enterprises

According to 2018 Q3 statistics from Gartner, Huawei storage ranked first in terms of revenue, shipment volume, and shipment capacity in China’s market. Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado V3 all-flash series and OceanStor F V5 series have gained strong market performance since their launches. The Gartner report indicates that Huawei’s all-flash storage reached the highest revenue growth rate in the world.

Huawei provides the industry’s first all-flash storage series that supports the NVMe architecture in midrange and high-end models. OceanStor Dorado V3 also offers the industry’s fastest midrange and high-end all-flash storage.

Storage Exhibition Area, Huawei China Σco-Partner Conference 2019

According to 2018 Q3 statistics from IDC, Huawei‘s all-flash storage has the largest market share in China. Kang Xiaoyu, Director of the China Enterprise IT Solutions Sales Dept. of Huawei EBG, said that all-flash customers in China are clustered in the finance, government, and carrier sectors. However, all-flash customers are rapidly increasing in enterprises, as well as the healthcare industry. Chinese customers are gravitating toward all-flash storage after gradually realizing its advantages in performance and TCO. Currently, the Top 12 banks and Top 4 insurance companies in China deploy Huawei’s all-flash storage.

Kang Xiaoyu, Director of the China Enterprise IT Solutions Sales Dept. of Huawei EBG

Today, Huawei all-flash storage is widely used in large banks such as Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Bank of China (BOC), China Construction Bank (CCB), Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), China CITIC Bank, and China Minsheng Bank. These financial enterprises selected Huawei all-flash storage to host their mission-critical databases, credit card services, and online transactions processing services. Huawei all-flash storage also carries mission-critical applications for some city-level commercial banks. Financial enterprises have demonstrated their enthusiasm, foresight, and determination in selecting Huawei‘s all-flash storage, from which their businesses are benefiting significantly. For the application pain points of financial enterprises, Huawei‘s all-flash storage is a timely hit.

Since 2015, China Life Insurance Company (CLIC) has deployed the Huawei OceanStor 18000F high-end all-flash series. Huawei’s high-end all-flash storage with 99.9999 percent availability provides CLIC with a stable and reliable platform for data storage, analysis, and management to easily cope with workload peaks. In addition, CLIC selected Huawei’s HyperMetro to provide all-in-one active-active solutions, including unified SAN and NAS. HyperMetro helps the insurance enterprise successfully deploy business-critical systems such as underwriting, claims, ERP, actuarial calculations, and office systems. With Huawei OceanStor, CLIC effectively meets the data synchronization requirements of cross-region and remote active-active data centers. The all-flash series can also meet the service production requirements of China Life Group at any time by providing efficient, secure, and reliable approaches to efficient data storage management.

From the overall layout of Huawei all-flash storage to the long-term positive feedback from industries such as finance, all-flash storage is becoming the mainstay for enterprise-class, mission-critical applications. In fact, all-flash storage is vital in terms of addressing technology maturity, stability, functionality, and cost-effectiveness. Thanks to these technology advancements, we are stepping into an exciting and challenging era where the transition from hybrid to all-flash storage is accelerating rapidly.

 

 

Source: Huawei Enterprise Blog
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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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