Going All-Flash: A Must for Carriers?

To succeed in the digital world, many in the telecommunications industry are developing their own digital transformation strategy, while helping other industries and sectors create a roadmap for their digital journeys.

Despite the clear benefits of digital tech like 5G and cloud computing, carriers are facing new challenges:

• The huge pressure of workloads requires better data capabilities for the internal BSS and OSS systems.
• External systems need to serve data-intensive applications like IoV, gaming, entertainment, and AR/VR.

International Data Corporation (IDC) reported that in many cases, devices in carriers’ data centers are outdated — even out of warranty — with performance issues and high failure rates. Moreover, traditional storage devices feature a large footprint, high power consumption, and expensive O&M, causing OPEX to soar.

Therefore, modern infrastructure is needed to handle both existing difficulties and future storage. And carriers are looking to new, powerful all-flash data centers to upgrade their devices and modernize the data foundation to optimize ROI.

Pain points of traditional architectures

In the information era, customer satisfaction is everything. As a major driving force behind digital transformation, improved customer loyalty is a KPI for emerging value-added services in any industry. However, traditional architectures have become a bottleneck for user experience (UX).

The following lists the typical pain points faced by many carriers with, for example, the distributed database scenario:

• Siloed deployment, meaning complex IT infrastructure
• Storage-compute coupling, causing inefficient use of IT resources
• Difficult to adapt to service changes during peak hours
• Unable to flexibly expand storage resources, incurring high management costs

Finding solutions in the all-flash data center

To avoid the reliability weaknesses often found in coupled storage-compute solutions, all-flash data centers run on a decoupled storage-compute architecture, offering the elastic expansion of compute and storage resources for efficient and economical use.

In line with all-flash evolution, all-flash data centers also deliver these benefits:

• Persistent memory accelerates data access while providing enterprise-class storage management functions.
• The NVMe transmission standard directly connects SSDs to CPUs over PCIe channels, significantly reducing latency.
• NVMe interfaces not only improve data security but simplify management of all-flash data centers.
• All-flash storage yields a much smaller physical footprint, higher disk density, and lower power consumption over HDD models.

These advantages serve as compelling arguments for how all-flash technology combined with a new architecture can help customers slash costs and increase efficiency, while achieving the ultimate goal of being green.

All-flash success case: A major carrier ensures sustainable core services and bolsters UX

One major carrier’s IT systems were plagued with performance and stability issues due to increasing workloads and irregular peak hours.

To ensure service efficiency and quality, the company developed TeleDB, a database based on MySQL. It also reconstructed its system architecture to improve database reliability and automate O&M.

Specifically, the company needed to address three main challenges:

1. High reliability to ensure smooth running of core services.
2. Better agility to facilitate service development.
3. Cost-effectiveness to lower the TCO.

To meet these challenges, the carrier adopted an all-flash data center, running on a decoupled storage-compute architecture to ensure the reliable and stable running of core services. Other benefits for the carrier include:

• More efficient use of IT resources.
• Less energy consumption and footprint.
• RTO shortened from hours to minutes.

On top of that, the all-flash data center creates a new foundation for new service development in the era of mobile Internet thanks to its future-ready architecture.

Building a faster, greener, and stronger data foundation with all-flash

Many forward-thinking organizations have already made the move to all-flash data centers. With an excellent price-performance ratio, moving to an all-flash model also proves to be the right choice for carriers to build their next-gen infrastructure.

With clear advantages in agility, availability, reliability, efficiency, and cloud adaptability, all-flash storage is an important pillar for addressing future storage needs.

Put simply, going all-flash is not just a nice-to-have, but rather a must-have for carriers to achieve greater success.

To support the transition to a faster, more reliable, and sustainable data center, Huawei offers a broad portfolio of products and solutions that suit various industries, workloads, and scenarios.

Learn more about our award-winning all-flash data center solutions and how you can build sustainable growth for your business.

This post is adapted from the Huawei-sponsored IDC White Paper titled Moving Towards an All-Flash Data Center Era to Accelerate Digital Transformation.

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.