Kathy Gibson is at Mobile World Congress 2019 in Barcelona – As telecommunications operators move to cloud-based data centres and networks, distributed storage is becoming a necessary reality for them.
Huawei has launched its next generation of data centre-level converged distributed storage. FusionStorage 8.0 is designed to help carriers and other enterprise users to cope with cloud migration challenges, according to Meng Guangbin, president of IT product line intelligent storage and data management domain at Huawei Technologies.
He points out that new technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) pose scalability and management challenges to traditional centralised storage that is typically deployed in siloes. There is a need for a new type of storage that bridges the gaps between different models, centrally stores and manages various applications, reduces their total cost of ownership (TCO), and improves the service efficiency of digital platforms.
Huawei’s FusionStorage 8.0 allows one storage system to support block, file, object, HDFS and database protocols. It manages mixed workloads in all scenarios while supporting full data lifecycle management from data generation and disaster recovery, to analytics and archiving, which protects free data mobility on- and off-premise.
Guangbin explains that Huawei FusionStorage 8.0 implements one-stop deployment through converged protocols to eliminate silo-like deployment when using different protocols. This reduces TCO by as much as 30% while improving resource utilisation.
With converged critical workloads, FusionStorage 8.0 lets one storage system support both core and emerging enterprise applications. Converged scenarios allow one storage system to manage data throughout its lifecycle from generation, usage, and management, to backup and archiving.
Converged clouds afford the integration of edge, private, and public clouds on one platform, which offers consistent user experiences. Converged management allows a unified intelligent platform to provide integrated operations and maintenance (O&M) and operations, realising data intelligence and creating value.
With the five convergence capabilities, FusionStorage 8.0 achieves the “One Data Center/One Storage” goal, simplifies storage device models, shatters management complexities, reduces data usage costs, and enables free data mobility and sharing on- and off-premises. What’s more, Ever New Device Service eliminates service interruption risks and the need for data migration.
Huawei FusionStorage 8.0 is a distributed storage system that supports critical enterprise workloads. It enables one cluster to scale out to 4 096 nodes and provides tens of millions of IOPS.
With enterprise-grade storage chips and FlashLink acceleration technology, FusionStorage 8.0 allows nodes to work with SSDs more efficiently, providing a latency as low as 0,5 milliseconds and reliability of up to 99,9999%.
FusionStorage 8.0 has pioneered an asynchronous replication technology that supports second-level recovery point objectives (RPOs) for business continuity across data centres. The company’s self-adaptive deduplication and compression capabilities offer up to five-to-one data reduction ratio even in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) scenarios.
While the OceanStor storage solutions offer massively distributed storage, there are many companies that don’t require these capabilities – but they still required quick and secure access to critical information.
Ron Raffensperger, director of enterprise data centre marketing and solution sales at Huawei, says the company has launched a new all-flash range of storage solutions that address the issues of data on demand.
He adds that Huawei is currently the top all-flash vendor, recording 410% growth rates, and with a number of success stories under its belt.
Organisations across the board need more speed, they need to handle higher capacities, and they need to be able to respond quickly.
“We are focussing on helping them achieve more speed using NVMe for enterprises,” Raffensperger points out..
NVMe is able to radically increase access speeds, and Huawei has announced that all its systems now use the technology to achieve consistent 0,3-millisecond latency.
Data protection is critical for storage, Raffenberger adds, and Dorado all-flash systems all include the same features as the OceanStor products, offering 99,999% availability.
All-flash storage is traditionally expensive and beyond the reach of smaller enterprise. Addressing this gap, Hauwei is announcing the Dorado3000 V3 system as its new entry-level product. It includes all the features of its higher-end stablemates but focuses on affordability to reach a market that traditionally doesn’t benefit from all-flash storage.