Kathy Gibson reports from the Huawei Cloud Congress in Shanghai – A converged storage infrastructure lets companies deploy one operating system across various storage topologies.
Ruiqi Fan, president of the IT storage line at Huawei Technologies, outlined the benefits of converged storage that the recently-launched OceanStor operating system (OS) can offer enterprise users.
The new OceanStor V3, launched in May in Beijing, offers converged storage with advanced hardware and simplified management.
More than that, the OceanStor OS offers convergence across the board, avoiding data silos and letting data flow freely through a more agile business.
“The question many enterprises have is whether to deploy SAN or NAS? Our answer is – both,” says Fan. “We are not an add on system, we integrate SAN and NAS into one system.
“One OceanStor OS can be installed in different storage architectures – allowing free flow of data from entry level to high end.”
A single storage platform has been shown to improve productivity by 300%, and to reduce disaster recovery costs by about 30%.
“But what about SSD?” Fan asks, “Yes, OceanStor OS can combine the performance and capacity of SSD as well.”
The traditional storage procurement cycle would require a new set of hardware for backup, Fan points out. The OceanStor OS, however, includes backup services, driving a 40% reduction in costs through having no need for a dedicated backup server.
Investment protection through legacy support is built in. Importantly, the OceanStor OS is built on open systems and can be used to manage third-party storage equipment.
This management extends across the enterprise and OceanStor can turn all storage architectures, from realtime and unified storage to big data and cold storage into a service-driven environment.
“Computing should be like a cloud – flexible; and data should be like water – continuous,” Fan says.
Major enterprises are using OceanStor to store and manage enormous quantities of data.
Bruno Mahe, head of technology at Illumination Mac Gulf in France, demonstrated how his company used the product for the 3D rendering required for the earlier Despicable Me movies.
“Now, Huawei is helping on to move down the cloud road,” he says. “We are aiming for a converged media cloud environment and have already started migrating some data.”
BGI, the biggest genomics research institute in the world, is also using Huawei solutions to store and manage enormous quantities of big data.
Magic Fang, president of BGI, points out that storage is just the start of the challenge in genomics. With a human genome taking up approximately 10Tb, the magnitude of just 1-million people’s information becomes enormous.
In addition, says Fang, when comparisons need to be made between one genome the 1-million, a robust big data platform is required.
“If we look into the future we need a converged storage platform for gene sampling, the sequencing platform, the analysis platform, the gene bank and gene application,” he says.
“Huawei is our preferred partner, using big data storage.”