Huawei modernises storage with OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage Series
Modern businesses are under pressure to be agile, adaptive and innovative. The IT department feels the brunt of it, as the organisations goes through digital transformation projects, while still needing to keep the lights on.
Data is the core of intelligent management; the intelligent management, scheduling, mining, and analysis of data allows applications to deliver personalised experience and companies implement precision control over the design, production and logistics process to reduce management costs. Data is defining new business models and creating new commercial opportunities.
Additionally, businesses need to store a lot of data, and think nothing of having to store data into multiple petabytes. The digital and intelligent transformation demands high-performance infrastructures, and there's the added challenge of an expanding and demanding regulatory environment which places demands on the organisation's storage environment.
How can modern businesses keep up with the storage demands of the volumes of data, while meeting regulatory compliance? A different way of working, in both the data centre and the wider business transformation, can be found in All Flash Arrays (AFA) storage.
Born with high performance, all-flash storage is one of the new engines being touted for mission-critical services. Competition and progress in all-flash storage has created a level of maturity, reliability, and cost-effectiveness that exceeds hybrid disk arrays in all characteristics except raw capacity, providing data centres with higher agility and service capability.
Huawei is one of the vendors in the market, that has vertically integrated its capabilities in chips, networks, and management. Highlighting its leadership position, Huawei has released the OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage series, which adopts an intelligent Solid State Drives (SSDs) controller chip, intelligent multi-protocol processing chip, and intelligent BMC management chip to build an end-to-end service acceleration platform, delivering triple performance and maximizing resource utilisation.
Data is stored on SSDs, that's why performance and stability of these drives are critical. The control unit is responsible for data read/write. The Flash Translation Layer (FTL) is used to store the mapping between the user LBA and the physical page in the SSD. To achieve the ultimate in storage speed, Huawei leverages an innovative SSD controller chip to accelerate data read and write. The FTL algorithm is moved from the control software layer to the SSD controller chip, so that all FTL reads and writes are performed by the chip, significantly reducing the number of software interactions and hence the I/O response latency.
For example; a computer using Windows 95 needs to load a long string of codes after being powered on, which takes two to three minutes. After switching to Windows 2010, the computer has a stronger CPU to load the codes. You can enter the "Start Up" interface instantaneously. According to tests by Huawei's performance and interoperability lab, the read latency of Huawei SSDs is as low as 80 μs in low-load scenarios, which is better than the other vendors; the performance is two times higher than that of competitors.
To achieve end-to-end acceleration, Huawei developed the FlashLink technology by combining SSDs and storage controller , NVMe architecture, and a storage operating system designed for flash from the ground up. Huawei's Dorado storage can deliver three times higher performance after enabling of value-added features such as deduplication, compression, and snapshot, while maintaining 0.5 ms latency, eliminating performance shortage issues in peak hours.
Whether for new applications such as artificial intelligence, Big Data, autonomous driving, and blockchain, or traditional healthcare, manufacturing, and finance industries, innovative chip technologies have become the main driving force of enterprises.
The intelligent SSD, within the OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage series, has a controller chip purpose-built for the flash media, exploring full potential of flash to improve user experience. The multi-protocol intelligent processing chip simplifies networking, reduces management costs, and offloads network protocols to accelerate data read/write.
OceanStor Dorado's intelligent BMC management chip accelerates fault locating, implements failover in seconds, and excels in energy saving, helping users leasing IT devices to reduce costs and explore new business opportunities.
Find out how Huawei is continually improving its storage products.