Huawei has launched a range of new data storage solutions during MWC, which offer the capability to reduce costs and simplify data storage for operators.
The OneStorage range was updated by the president of Huawei’s IT product line Dr Peter Zhou (pictured) at Mobile World Congress Barcelona. The four new pieces of hardware are the OceanStar Dorado all-flash storage, OceanStar Pacific distributed storage and OceanProtect backup storage, FusionCube HCI.
Zhou said “storage is vital” for operators to carry out digital transformation plans - a hot button challenge for operators looking to streamline and save operational costs as data demands increase from customers.
Looking into the IT Infrastructure of operators, Zhou noted segments of their operations are becoming “isolated”, such as billing, ERP and OSS.
“It's not a way for them to support their future business by doing that, it literally costs them money and also means all departments face being isolated as well because data cannot flow from billing to OSS and then to the B2B department,” explained Zhou. “If the data cannot flow between each other, then that makes the carrier's doing business really difficult.”
Zhou acknowledged another challenge for carriers is the increasing size of data being carried on their networks, as new technologies emerge from 5G and fibre technology.
These highlighted challenges led Huawei to develop the OneStorage solutions, said Zhou. He explained the solutions were developed over the past few years so different storages can seamlessly connect to one another, and complemented with software to help operators achieve certain goals at multiple levels, and overall have data flow through the different departments to make operations smoother.
Innovating through bottlenecks by 2023
Looking ahead, Zhou said Huawei is developing a new architecture to break past “bottlenecks” seen in current storage solutions, with the aim to introduce such innovation by 2023.
He said current CPUs are set up in the Von Neumann architecture, which the majority of computers are based on, and that Huawei is looking to innovate past its constraints.
“In that architecture, the CPU is connecting to the memory, and then a lot of data is installed to hard disk or SSD, but those hard disks are basically using IO (input-output) interface to connect to the CPU. Everyone knows the IO interface has very high latency compared to the communication between the memory and CPU.”
He added: “The next step is trying to adopt a data-centric architecture. In that architecture, the CPU and disks will be connecting to the memory directly. We believe that's the direction for next-generation storage and we are implementing that the progress internally is quite good, we hope we can deliver that one in the market around 2023.”
