Data is being created exponentially as more individuals and enterprises are becoming data-driven in this digital era. Amid the explosive data growth in this intelligent world, there’s an even bigger need for powerful data storage capabilities.
While data storage capability is currently determined by capacity, this may not be the only factor required to measure the future advancement and construction of storage systems, especially with the latest high-level computational needs like artificial intelligence (AI) and big data.
The President of Huawei IT Product Line, Peter Zhou, talked to Telecom Review about the advantages of establishing a data-centric, trustworthy storage foundation for diverse applications in scenarios like production and transactions, data analytics and data protection. “Definitely yes, we have AI application; we also have big data application. The thing is that in this kind of application; one thing is unstructured data becomes very common and the volume of those data becomes bigger and bigger. But on the other hand, the value of those unstructured data become also determinable for our customer’s business.”
Huawei has identified four major changes that can take place regarding data storage in the digital era. First, new data applications are constantly made, from conventional databases to distributed databases, big data and AI applications. Secondly, data is becoming hotter and hotter, requiring much faster real-time data analytics and processing. The next change is that natural disasters and human error remain prevalent, resulting in huge losses. And lastly, energy-efficient data storage is a major industry direction and is becoming the new normal.
Huawei is well equipped with the solutions and technologies to address these changes, offering a series of premium storage products and solutions for different industry scenarios.
Zhou explained, “The challenge to our product is it needs to be cost-effective to accommodate more and more data. So, we need innovative technologies. And also, we really think that one storage system can support different kinds of data rather than one equipment support, one type of data where you need a circulated equipment but will make the whole system very complicated and cost more. So, in Huawei, we always think that we use one equipment to support different kind of data supported, and that means different kinds of apps can share the data in one equipment that will provide more action to our customers.”
Amid these changes, Huawei is also revolutionizing the data storage industry. Michael Fan, director of Huawei data storage marketing solution sales, said that aside from developing innovative products, they make sure these products comply with market demands.
And for customers these days, Fan noted, reliability is one of the most important requirements. “The reliability in the past five years for Huawei data storage customers, we didn’t see any Level 1 downtime case. A Level 1 downtime case means the customer’s main data system, main working system has a downtime of two hours. In the past five years, [we’ve seen] zero Level 1 of Huawei customers. Every year, you will hear a public cloud provider has a downtime of several hours…but they are not accused by any of their customers. And the reason is…99.95 availability. That means every year, if you have downtime within 24 hours, it is still allowed in their service agreement. But for Huawei [and] our high-end storage system, we can guarantee [to] the customer that we can add a “silent night” availability which means that every year, your downtime is around within two seconds, so that’s a big difference [from a] reliability point of view.”
Bringing Complete Storage Solutions For Industries
Huawei has come up with a different approach to storage by focusing more on the advancement of decoupled storage computer designs.
Zhou clarified that as the data amount uncontrollably expands, and as the value of the data starts to be very important, then it must be stored in secure professional storage. He said, “Otherwise, it means wasting. On the other hand, [on the] cloud side, particularly, the public cloud side, the situation is also changing. Right now, the public cloud business starts to be mature…which means that kind of industry starts to be really decoupled…Some professional companies they learn to focus on SaaS, and some professional companies they learn to focus on PaaS. This also gives opportunity to the traditional storage companies…in public cloud, which means we can develop our product to facilitate the situation in public cloud for us.”
From banking to shipping and into other industries, Huawei has provided the most efficient means to evaluate, design and build data storage capabilities. It has introduced a series of premium storage products and solutions for different industry scenarios. These include OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage, which brings SAN and NAS capabilities; OceanStor Pacific Scale-Out Storage, which breaks down the performance, protocols and capacity bottlenecks of data analytics using technical architecture breakthroughs; OceanProtect Data Protection, which delivers comprehensive data protection against natural disasters or man-made mistakes; Huawei DME, that enables full-lifecycle automation across planning, deployment, O&M and optimization; and the OceanStor Dorado NAS, which decouples containerized applications from storage so that application and storage resources can be expanded on demand.
Aside from producing these storage products and solutions, Huawei is also committed to providing energy-efficient data storage.
“We believe that green technology is important. Particularly, people today have concerns on [the] data center which is energy-consuming. So, we put more and more advanced technology inside of it: for example, a lot of innovation to make efficient moving data from a storage to memory to CPU, making the system more efficient, which also means energy saving. So that’s basically [a] very fundamental aspect to facilitate the challenges,” Zhou noted.
Huawei As A Partner In Digital Transformation In Asia Pacific
Huawei has already established its digital footprint in the Asia-Pacific market. For example, it has partnered with one of the biggest banking companies in Singapore, where it supported the bank’s continuously evolving requirements and helped accelerate its digital transformation.
And Huawei sees more opportunities to extend to the many countries in the region amid the digital transformation projects currently being planned.
“To me in the Asia-Pacific area, I really think that Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, these countries are really in the top 1 level because I can see that more and more industries start to use digital technology for their marketing, for their production. A lot of improvements happening here, so definitely I think we need to pay more attention into this market,” Zhou said.
He added, “Asia Pacific is quite unique when I talk about global market. When I say unique, it has really got big potential. It’s just the starting point of the digital transformation. Still, a lot of industries, they need digital technology to keep improving their efficiency and to enhance the power for them to explore their market.
“We really would like to put more investment and attention in Asia Pacific, particularly in Thailand. Thailand is extremely important in Asia Pacific as we talk about the potential of the digital economy and the technological engineering resources we can found locally,” concluded Zhou.