Innovative Data Infrastructure Forum: Huawei Storage Concept of ‘Building Data-Centric’

At the 2022 Innovative Data Infrastructure Forum, Huawei proposed a storage concept of ‘building a data-centric, trustworthy storage foundation for diverse applications.’

Speech by Dr. Peter Zhou, VP, Huawei and president, IT product line, Huawei

To continuously build reliable and fundamental storage technologies, the company has will prioritize the development of decoupled storage-compute architectures and diverse data application acceleration engines. Such solutions will be for helping enterprises accelerate digital transformation and cope with diverse data applications.

As data volumes continue to grow, storage technologies have struggled to keep up. There are 4 primary challenges facing the storage industry. First, There are insufficient workloads solutions for emerging applications, such as distributed databases, big data, AI, and ‘High-Performance Data Analytics’ (HPDA) applications. Second, data service acceleration will require faster and real-time data analysis and processing to improve production and user experience. Third, higher data protection standards will be needed to mitigate increasingly frequent data attacks that could cause huge economic loss. Finally, these green solutions will be needed in storage to increase energy efficiency.

OceanStor Pacific distributed storage systems

Dr. Peter Zhou, president, IT product line, Huawei, explained at the forum that the company already offers a series of enhanced competitive storage products that proactively addressed these changes, including OceanStor Dorado All-Flash storage, OceanStor Pacific distributed storage, OceanProtect Backup Storage, and FusionCube. While these offerings are suitable for many industries and enterprises, advancements in 3 areas will be needed for them to serve as a fully data-centric, trustworthy storage foundation for all applications.

OceanStor Dorado All-Flash storage systems

First, they will need a decoupled storage-compute architecture. As enterprises continuously accelerate their digital transformation, emerging data applications are gradually becoming production applications, demanding higher data reliability. Furthermore, the lifecycle gap between computing and data is expanding, requiring flexible and independent management and maintenance of computing and storage resources. A decoupled storage-compute architecture would better utilize elastic, reliable, and cost-effective storage to facilitate faster, more reliable, and efficient services at lower costs.

Second, there needs to be more data application acceleration engines within storage systems. To cope with diverse data applications, future-oriented storage is expected to house data persistently while also providing a way to build data infrastructure that combines a data persistence layer with the application acceleration engine. Emerging data applications, such as distributed databases, big data, and AI applications that produce mass data, are continuing to grow. And so, future storage systems should be built with metadata management and intensive data processing to form diverse data application acceleration engines, improving end-to-end processing efficiency by up to 10x and improving customer experience and operational efficiency.

And finally, a green design system will be needed to improve the product development process. Such a design would cover 3 aspects: green production, such as renewable materials; green products with low-carbon components, like NAND flash, high-density hardware design, data reduction, and resource pools for less space occupied and better resource efficiency; and green enablers, that is, supporting enterprise services that optimize production operations for higher energy efficiency.

Zhou also noted that, over the past 3 decades, storage has evolved to become the optimal foundation of high-value data in line with the data application development: “We are ushering in the yottabyte era. Data applications are growing faster than ever. This forum’s theme is Green, Acceleration, and Innovation, and this is also the development orientation of Huawei Storage. Together with our partners, we will provide high-quality storage products and solutions to create more value for customers.“