We have fully entered the digital era. IoT, cloud computing, video, and social networking, and other accelerators continue to emerge. Each class of data is mushrooming as new pillar technologies are incorporated. Analysts predict that by 2020, 80% of subscribers will use their mobile phones to browse content, link up to social media, shop for goods, and work with higher efficiency. The total volume of data worldwide is expected to exceed 44 ZB.

The increases in data scales create some rather daunting challenges for storage systems of telecom carriers. The systems must be able to quickly process massive amounts of data with accelerated response. It is also hard to predict the storage performance and capacity requirements because the volume of different classes of data may grow suddenly and sporadically. Business continuity and data security requirements also raise the needed levels of stability in storage. The escalating demands go on and on.

Arrival of the all-flash era

Flash memory used to be considered a differentiated competitive advantage, but now it is a must-have in cloud data centers.

Flash delivers high performance and low latency, achieving thousands of inputs/outputs per second. An IDC report shows annual investments into data centers amount to 1.2 trillion USD but that 25% of those resources are wasted on prolonged data read/write. In this context, the high performance and rapid response capabilities of the storage systems become all the more important.

Huawei started to invest in developing its own SSDs twelve years back in 2005. According to an authoritative industry consultancy, the SSD share of the enterprise market is expected to surpass that of conventional SAS disks in 2017. Huawei estimates that all production services at data centers will run on flash storage media by 2020. The arrival of the all-flash era is upon us.

Figure 1: Trends in SSD applications (flash dominates data centers in 2020)

Lightning fast, rock solid all-flash

The industry fully acknowledges the speed advantages of flash yet many still have their reservations concerning the reliability and level of availability of the medium. This thinking is the last hurdle to fully bringing flash into data centers.

Huawei is committed to breaking through the ''availability'' barrier. How to do this? The answer is in developing lightning fast, rock solid all-flash storage systems.

With its leading features and attributes, Huawei's new-gen all-flash OceanStor Dorado V3 sets itself apart from the pack in all-flash storage systems. Huawei develops its own operating system, chips, and SSDs to deliver the penetrating optimizations needed from end to end – no other vendor can make this claim. The series provides up to 4 million IOPS at a stable and predictable latency of 500 µs. With outstanding performance and by fully tapping into the efficiency of flash, the series is able to fully satisfy processing requirements on heavily-loaded services.

OceanStor Dorado V3 employs Huawei patented reliability technologies, LDPC error correction algorithms, full-redundant architectures, and can tolerate up to three simultaneous disk failures. These and other designs for reliability deliver a three-fold improvement in SSD service life, satisfying the availability requirements for the vast majority of data center layouts.

As data centers are moved to the cloud, enterprises are also upping their demands on availability. Combined with Huawei HyperMetro, a gateway-free active-active data center solution, Dorado V3 provides up to six-nines availability to ensure business continuity and that services remain up and running at all times.

Inline deduplication and compression technologies improve utilization of storage space by more than five times while reducing TCO by 70%.

Figure 2: Huawei OceanStor Dorado V3

Customer vetted, customer approved

A report from Gartner in the third quarter of 2016 placed Huawei in the number-one slot in the China market for storage. Huawei Storage has also been the fastest growing vendor in the world for 18 straight quarters. The Gartner Magic Quadrant report released in October of 2016 placed Huawei in the "Leader" square for general-purpose storage arrays.

Huawei is fully committed to establishing long-term partnerships with global partners. Huawei provides data center solutions to over 6000 customers worldwide, including Vodafone, DT, Telefonica, VIVACOM, Hutchison, Etisalat, MTN, STC, BT, TI, China Mobile, and a host of other telecom carriers.

Huawei Storage has been stepping up investments to make its offerings the best on the market, and customers have responded. Huawei is well positioned to help telecom carriers make the move to the cloud at their data centers as the all-flash era draws closer.