The company proposes a new method of data storage, as well as some upgrades to its storage platforms.
Chinese telecommunications company Huawei has proposed a new method of data storage that would “prioritize the development of decoupled storage-compute architectures and diverse data application acceleration engines,” according to a press release. As part of the company’s 2022 Innovative Data Infrastructure Forum, Huawei said this move would assist businesses with data transformation while working with a broad range of applications.
“We are ushering in the yottabyte era. Data applications are growing faster than ever,” said Dr. Peter Zhou, president of Huawei’s IT Product Line. “[Innovative Data Infrastructure 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.”
Huawei’s proposal for new age data storage
The proposal for a new data storage solution has led Huawei to “prioritize the development of decoupled storage-compute architectures and diverse data application acceleration engines,” per Zhou’s speech.
However, there are four main challenges that need to be addressed for this proposal to become a reality:
- Insufficient workload solutions for emerging applications
- Data services acceleration requiring faster and real-time data analysis and processing
- Higher data protection standards needed
- Innovative green solutions will be needed
A decoupled storage compute architecture will be key for enterprises to embrace this new method of data storage, as increased data reliability is a must. This proposed new architecture would theoretically use trustworthy and economical storage to deliver faster solutions for industries and companies at a lower cost. Another pivotal factor will be faster data application capabilities in storage systems. This new type of data storage would be required to host data regularly along with methods of building data infrastructure with the accelerated capabilities of the storage system.
Future storage systems are expected to include both metadata governance and comprehensive data processing capabilities to improve user experiences when housing data persistently. The renewable aspect will also be considerable, as the system would need to run on green materials with carbon-reducing components.
According to Huawei’s Global Industry Vision report, by 2030, 1 yottabyte of data will be generated globally every year, representing a 23-fold increase from 2020. Storing mass data consumes enormous amounts of energy, making green and sustainable development ever more important.
SEE: An enterprise storage dictionary for non-experts (TechRepublic)
Additional insights from Huawei
Huawei not only announced their new and tailor-made solutions to clients, they also provide macro-economic outlook in the upcoming era where data applications are growing faster than ever. One way the company intends on doing this is through the upgrading of its OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage and OceanProtect Backup Storage products for all-flash data centers. This will include a ransomware protection storage solution, along with the datacenter storage tool kit to continue the company’s move towards secure and renewable storage solutions.
The company also announced upgrades for its OceanStor Pacific distributed storage, with the ability to perform disaster recovery for multiple working data centers and a converged storage solution for data lake houses. This advancement in the Pacific series is intended to meet increased needs of enterprise customers and new applications such as high performance data analytics, big data and mass data backup and archiving.
“In the yottabyte era, cutting-edge technologies such as HPC, big data analytics, and AI are the main reasons why we have so many new applications and service flows today,” said Hugo Doucet, executive account representative at Huawei. “We can use the word ‘hybrid’ to describe their typical characteristics, for example, hybrid performance model, hybrid multi-protocol access mode, and hybrid analysis based on historical and streaming data. The nature of Hybrid ‘X’ comes from the uncertainty of new workloads. To embrace new workloads with ease, we need to use certain solutions to cope with the uncertainty of service flows. The key to this lies in storage system innovation.”