Intelligent Finance Summit: Huawei Unveils Flash-to-Flash-to-Anything (F2F2X) Data Infrastructure Architecture

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. launched its data center data infrastructure architecture F2F2X (Flash-to-Flash-to-Anything) at the Financial Data Storage Session, a part of the Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit 2023.

Michael Fan, VP, global data center marketing and solution sales dept, enterprise BG, Huawei

This architecture forms a reliable data foundation to help financial institutions handle the challenges brought by new data, new apps, and new resilience.

For banks, intelligence is driving the creation of new business scenarios and business models. A number of new services are emerging, including customization, smart contracts, digital assets, and metaverse banking, posing three challenges to banks’ existing data infrastructure.

Data processing for massive amounts of new data: IDC estimates that by 2025, the amount of data generated by banks WW will reach 48.6 ZB, with a CAGR of 26.2%. Banks will need to address capacity, performance, and energy efficiency challenges brought by huge amounts of unstructured data.
Containerization applications for banks create new data management challenges: 89% of enterprises are transitioning to multi-cloud business strategies. In the multi-cloud era, efficient data flow between different apps and medium will become a new challenge for bank data management.
New higher data resilience to rampant ransomware attacks: A successful enterprise ransomware attack causes on average $7.8 million in losses.

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The F2F2X architecture provides all-flash primary and backup storage and diversified archive storage. This architecture is designed to efficiently unleash the potential of data and activate the potential of ‘4^+’(data acceleration⁺, data resilience⁺, data mobility⁺, data management⁺) data centers.

Data acceleration⁺: Core technologies such as decoupled storage and compute and multi-controller and multi-active architecture accelerate data processing in financial new digital core and financial data warehouse scenarios, realize all-flash primary storage and backup, and have 30% higher performance than the industry’s next best.
Data resilience⁺: The proprietary ML algorithm has the industry’s highest detection rate (99.9%) and forms the last line of defense for data protection with a 4-layer storage ransomware protection solution.
Data mobility⁺: 6 intelligent data tiering capabilities and the DME global data scheduling engine ensure the lowest TCO throughout the data lifecycle.
Data management⁺: Focusing on service scenarios such as financial data analysis and AI, the company’s data lifecycle intelligent management platform DME enables second-level search of 10 billion files, multi-dimensional intelligent insight into global files, quickly identifies hot and cold data distribution, and intelligently tiers or deletes data, improving management efficiency.

Spark Wang, director, cybersecurity and privacy, PwC China, said: “For ransomware attacks, we need to enhance network-side protection to reduce the risks of attacks. Furthermore, data resilience also needs to improve. In the event of network-side protection failure, we need to take quick measures to prevent data from being encrypted, and provide prompt attack warnings. In the event that production data is encrypted or the entire data center is ‘contaminated’, we need to retain a complete and clean data copy for rapid recovery of the service system.“

Michael Fan, VP, global data center marketing and solution sales dept, Huawei Enterprise BG, said: ” Huawei’s data infrastructure products and solutions have been used by over 1,300 financial institutions worldwide. Customers’ desire for “4+” data centers motivates us to always innovate. With the F2F2X architecture as the blueprint, we will continue increasing R&D investment and building a “more reliable, efficient, and greener” data foundation for financial industry to deal with business challenges in the intelligent era.“