Several years of sustained investment in data storage solutions coupled with continuous innovation and significant improvements in vision and execution, mean that Huawei can boast a full set of storage products that ranks it among the market leaders in terms of product competitiveness.
It comes as no surprise therefore that Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado primary storage solution has been named a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrants for Primary Storage for 7 consecutive years.
Huawei selected MWC2023 for a timely and much anticipated presentation by senior company representatives, of recent advances in its key product lines and technology areas. As part of its GUIDE initiative (Gigabit everywhere, Ultra-automation, Intelligent multi-cloud connection, Differentiated Experience, and Environmental Harmony) which the company likens to the pillars of a bridge between 5G and 5.5G, and towards 6G, successive senior speakers from Huawei outlined key developments in their respective business areas.
Announcing a number of new data storage products and solutions, Peter Zhou, President of Huawei’s IT Product Line, explained that Huawei would be supporting carriers on a number of fronts.
In addition to OceanStor Dorado, Huawei has already received plaudits for its other storage products including being voted number one among global vendors by Gartner Peer Insights for the OceanStor Scale-Out storage solution, and returning some impressive performance results in Evaluator Group’s tests of the OceanProtect backup storage product.
Based on real-world environments, Evaluator Group’s rigorous assessment concluded that the Huawei product, introduced in 2022 and designed to help enterprises address data protection pain points related to cost, data growth and continuous uptime requirements, had achieved 3x faster backup and recovery with 49% more data stored in the same space.
Ensuring data mobility and security in a multi-cloud environment
According to Zhou, the emergence of key technologies such as cloud computing, IoT, big data, ToB (business-to-business) video, and blockchain are key factors underlying today’s challenges for data storage. The iteration of 5G, AI, and big data technologies have generated mass unstructured data twenty times that of the 4G era, and long-term storage of these massive volumes of data at low cost and with the capability to mine its value for monetization is a significant new challenge.
As the need to support innovative and more abundant applications drives the move to new cloud architectures, operators in turn are discovering that a multi-cloud approach offers them the greater advantages, says Peter. By connecting to the multi-cloud ecosystem, data storage systems can build a bridge for data flow in multi-cloud scenarios, enabling the free interaction between applications in different clouds. Support for data tiering will be provided by Huawei and supported by new products.
Choosing multi-cloud means that sharing data and supporting mobility is increasingly important, but under these conditions concerns about data security will naturally grow, Peter adds. The damage threats to data that have traditionally driven the demand for disaster recovery and backup systems are rapidly being overtaken by artificial factors such as ransomware attacks, which are happening with a frequency of every 12 seconds somewhere in the world. The cost of follow up attacks even after ransom payment can be in the millions of dollars, and defending against ransomware attacks has become a new pain point for data resilience.
New solutions and enhanced performance
In response to these opportunities and challenges, Huawei is releasing multiple new data storage offerings, further improving the storage base capabilities and covering all carrier service scenarios. These products are designed to help carriers migrate from traditional IT or CT services to emerging services, such as cloud and ToB and also support the transformation from on-premises deployment to multi-cloud deployment, says Peter.
By supporting intelligent cross-cloud data tiering, Huawei’s Multi-cloud Storage Solution enables different data to be placed in different media to achieve the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). The solution supports a unified cross-cloud data view enabling all data, including existing data, to be viewed, realizing the free flow of data across the cloud, and protecting customers' existing investments. Interconnection with the container platform ensures that customers' applications can be deployed across clouds, helping them to deploy new services.
For data archiving scenarios, blue-ray storage replaces old-style, more costly alternatives, effectively reducing TCO by 70%. In cloud data center scenarios, Huawei has launched the OceanDisk Smart Disk Enclosure, which helps reduce costs and power consumption by 40%.
In response to the emerging security threat, Huawei’s end-to-end ransomware protection effectively prevents ransomware attacks, boasting an impressive attack detection rate of 99.9%. It also offers comprehensive, industry-leading 4-layer protection.
Describing these announcements as a “big step” for Huawei Data Storage, Peter said Huawei solutions “fully embrace cloud native, helping operators build leading data infrastructure in the multi-cloud era.”
