Huawei Expert Interview: Understanding Emerging Business Needs for Data Storage

The digital economy has generated more data than ever before. This places higher demands on data storage for enterprises to run the business more intelligently, smoothly, securely, and sustainably. In this interview, Michael Fan, Director of the Data Storage Solution Sales Department of Huawei Enterprise BG, discusses storage trends and how Huawei is addressing the industry’s imminent challenges and business needs.

Industry Trends

The key issue that a lot of enterprises are facing today is to increase storage capacity following new business needs, while storage scalability is commonly measured in terms of capacity and performance. Can you guide us through the strengths of Huawei's storage solution?

Fan: Unpredictable business growth requires storage to provide simple linear increases in performance as more capacity is added to keep up with ever-changing business needs. Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage can be scaled out to up to 32 controllers, and its IOPS can reach up to 21,000,000 linearly as the quantity of controller enclosures increases, matching the performance needs of the future business development.

Besides primary storage, the Huawei OceanStor Pacific series uses a software-defined distributed architecture that linearly increases system capacity and performance through the scale-out of hardware nodes, eliminating the need for complex resource planning. The system can be easily expanded to thousands of nodes (4,096) and EB-level capacity, meeting users’ business growth needs. It also provides automatic load balancing policies to evenly distribute data and metadata to nodes, removing metadata access bottlenecks while also ensuring system performance in large-scale expansion scenarios.

Furthermore, OceanStor Pacific uses intelligent I/O priority scheduling, large I/O passthrough, multi-level small I/O cache, different cores for different workloads, and QoS to provide users with large bandwidth and high performance at a low latency. The OceanStor Pacific series can easily address a wide range of I/O-, latency, bandwidth, and capacity-intensive workload needs, driving your data centers well into the future.

Environmental Impact

Data center and ICT technologies were once perceived as an effective way to reduce carbon emission, but recent research shows that, on a global scale, data center power consumption amounted to about 416 terawatts, or roughly 3% of all electricity generated on the planet. So how can data centers become compatible with sustainability and climate protection? And how will Huawei address these concerns in its products and solutions?

Fan: The United Nations Environment Program reports that, in order to reach a 1.5°C (centigrade) temperature control target, global carbon emissions will have to fall by 7.6% annually in the next 10 years. To address these challenges, Huawei suggests the all flash data center in all scenarios. The aim of this solution is to build a faster, reliable, and especially greener data center. A 1.2 TB SAS disk consumes 7 watts of power, which is equivalent to a 7.68 TB SSD. If we use one SSD to replace one SAS disk, the power consumption saved in one year, converting into carbon emissions, is equivalent to planting around 150 trees. In addition to that, our OceanStor Dorado all-flash array can save cabinet space. If we use all-flash arrays to replace HDD arrays, the cabinet space can be reduced by at least 50%. This has been confirmed in many cases. For example, a European operator replaced 55 cabinets of HDD arrays with 9 OceanStor Dorado cabinets. A Latin American bank replaced 20 sets of HDD arrays with 10 sets of OceanStor Dorado.

Business Needs

Data might be lost or destroyed in the event of an emergency or disaster. What should companies do to enhance their data protection and disaster recovery (DR) abilities?

Fan: As the value of data — and threats to it — continue to increase, finding an effective data protection solution is more important than ever before, for both public and private organizations. With the evolution of more and more applications for data, requirements on the protection level, objects, performance, and scale have increased dramatically. Comprehensive protection throughout the entire data lifecycle is now paramount.

Huawei's full-lifecycle, data-protection solution provides DR, backup, and archiving services to help enterprises cope with the soaring volume of diversified data that drives the digital world. Powered by the latest cutting-edge technologies, it ensures zero service disruption, zero data loss, and long-term information retention. The solution implements comprehensive DR of hot data, rapid backup and restoration of warm data, and warm archiving of cold data throughout the data lifecycle. Designed for the digital world, it offers all-scenario intelligent convergence.

Security Concerns

Storage is facing external security challenges, as ransomware attacks have grown in number and complexity, as well as internal threats as an employee with the necessary privileges could access secure data and potentially corrupt or destroy it. How does Huawei address these threats?

Fan: Huawei's anti-ransomware solution effectively defends against ransomware attacks through multi-layered protection. For example, OceanStor production storage uses the preconfigured blacklist to intercept viruses and utilizes snapshots for anti-tampering. OceanProtect backup storage quickly restores data with backup copies and uses air-gap technology to create a data isolation zone for quick data restoration with snapshots or backup copies in the zone. It is an ideal choice for enterprises to ensure information security and operation stability.

Additionally, asynchronous/synchronous replication and active-active solutions between storage systems meet data protection, data movement, and data sharing requirements. To meet data sharing requirements of unstructured information, the Huawei distributed storage system allows the same copy of data to be accessed over multiple storage access protocols (CIFS, NFS, HDFS, and S3), reducing inefficiency and time waste caused by data migration. Huawei storage and data protection products provide intelligent analysis and detection of ransomware, secured snapshots, and WORM to protect data against ransomware. With all these storage technologies, Huawei storage can handle any data security risks with ease.

For more information about Huawei OceanStor Storage, please visit the website.

About Michael FanJie

Michael FanJie is currently the director of the Data Storage Solution Sales Department of Huawei Enterprise BG. He is responsible for international business sales of data storage and solutions, including but not limited to strategic planning, market selection, sales strategy development, and sales target achievement.