Huawei Proposes a New Innovative Data Storage Concept

At the 2022 Innovative Data Infrastructure Forum, Huawei proposed a new, innovative storage concept of “building a data-centric, trustworthy storage foundation for diverse applications.” To continuously build highly reliable and performant fundamental storage technologies., the company has announced it will prioritize the development of decoupled storage-compute architectures and diverse data application acceleration engines. Such solutions will be ideal for helping enterprises accelerate digital transformation and cope with diverse data applications.

As data volumes continue to grow exponentially, storage technologies have struggled to keep up. There are four 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 efficiency and user experience. Third, higher data protection standards will be needed to mitigate increasingly frequent data attacks that could cause huge economic loss. Finally, innovative green solutions will be needed in data storage to increase energy efficiency.

Dr. Peter Zhou, the President of Huawei’s IT Product Line, explained at the forum that Huawei already offers a full 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 three areas will be needed for them to serve as a fully data-centric, trustworthy data storage foundation for all applications.

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 10 times and significantly improving customer experience and operational efficiency.

And finally, a green design system will be needed to fundamentally improve the product development process. Such a design would cover three aspects: green production, such as renewable materials; green products with low-carbon components, like NAND flash, high-density hardware design, leading 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.

“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.”

Dr. Peter Zhou, President, Huawei’s IT Product Line