University of California Santa Cruz Deploys Huawei Cloud Storage System

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd announced that its
cloud storage system has been deployed at the University
of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), providing a petabyte-level storage, archiving,
and sharing platform for the Hyades
system, the primary on-campus supercomputer of UCSC, which is dedicated to
computational astrophysics research.

With growth of data resulting from increasingly intensified
research programs, the storage system of the astrophysics research became
challenged by the changing requirements for scalability, R/W performance,
reliability, and increase in deployment costs. The researchers have been in
urgent need of a new storage system and solution that is not only able to cope
with current issues but is also prepared for the more complex and stringent
research requirements in the foreseeable future.

Since
April 2013, Huawei has been providing its one petabyte Universal
Distributed Storage (UDS) system to pair with the Hyades supercomputer system.
After three months of tests performed by Hyades system engineers, the UDS
system was proven to provide powerful scalability and superb performance in
large-scale storage scenarios.

Huawei’s UDS cloud storage system employs the Advanced RISC Machine
(ARM) architecture, which enables flexible capacity expansion from petabyte to exxabyte as
well as a 4.2W/TB low power consumption. In addition to
features such as 2.1PB per cabinet high-density design and Zero Touch, the UDS
system also features multiple data center management, allowing for secure and
reliable cross-regional data movement in a unified resource pool, enabling UCSC
astrophysicists to better collaborate with affiliated research centers across
the US.

"Hyades features over ten times improvement
in performance than its predecessor," said Mr. Piero Madau, professor
of astronomy and astrophysics, UCSC cum principal investigator of the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. "With the Huawei system providing storage for
our simulation results, we can maximize the value of those results by making
them available to the astrophysics community."

Huawei’s storage business experienced significant growth in 2012, with
increases in sales revenue in both domestic and overseas enterprise markets.
Since 2013, the business adopted the philosophy of ‘Intelligence on Demand, Convergence for Future’,
addressing unpredicted storage requirements brought by data growth,
as well as the urgency to improve data management efficiency. In particular,
Huawei’s UDS cloud storage system has been deployed at the European
Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and since then, has been highly
sought after by a number of research institutes and carrier operators across
the world.