Brilliance in Resilience: How AI-Ready Data Infrastructure Is Shaping Tomorrow's World

AI is the gateway to the future, offering a springboard to greater scalability and productivity and helping you get ahead of competitors. But with this growth comes risks, such as an expanded attack surface through which hackers can gain access to the network. This landscape requires proactive measures that harden the backend systems and safeguard core business.

In our previous blog, we looked at two characteristics of AI-ready infrastructure: large-scale data ingestion and preprocessing, and high performance and strong consistency. Here, we look at the importance of resilience in business strategies, and Huawei's portfolio of data protection solutions that boast excellence in innovation and reliability.

Resilience in a nutshell

Gartner defines data recovery as the ability to reestablish network connectivity following sudden downtime, and the methods or procedures to return a site to full operation. Assuming most companies already use point-in-time snapshots or data copies as part of a wider disaster recovery or data protection plan, modern resilience systems must be more efficient—be it checkpoint loading speeds or multi-site protection—to minimize downtime and interruptions.

Implementing data reliability and resilience in half measures can cause irreversible damage. With much of society relying heavily on networks and where no data is completely off-limits, it is increasingly important that enterprises have cybersecurity programs in place to ensure a quick response to incidents — something that goes beyond simply protecting core assets in an isolated zone.

One understated aspect of AI-ready infrastructure is its cyber resilience. Modern solutions must provide a combination of resilience (high availability and reliability) and intrinsic security (protection against cyber threats) features that uncover hidden threats and inform better decisions. In today’s age, when data can be hacked, leaked, and tampered with, data storage serves as the last line of defense — a necessary measure to prevent and respond to threats.

Prevent, detect, and analyze

Precise control and prevention are no longer just a fantasy. Built on the Huawei Multilayer Ransomware Protection (MRP) Solution, network and storage collaboration technologies analyze historical and current data to deliver a 99.9% detection rate of known ransomware variants. This solution detects changes in I/O and file entropy to offer pre-, during-, and post-event protection.

Huawei's MRP Solution provides full-process encryption across storage, transmission, and replication to prevent interception or breaches from ransomware. Huawei’s solutions offer continuous data protection using read-only secure snapshots that restore data to specific points in time and cannot be deleted, and Air Gap which keeps these secure copies in an isolated environment and offline unless transmitted, minimizing attack surfaces.

Further, primary and backup storage uses the Write Once Read Many, or WORM feature that prevents data from being modified after it is written. Combined, these measures reduce the possibility of your data being encrypted and ensure most threats are identified and isolated before they affect services.

Recovery and continuity

Modern systems must prepare for potential downtime and have a recovery plan primed to go when needed. High-performance SSDs go beyond the normal capabilities of backup storage, providing excellent processing and bandwidth speeds to restore services as quickly as possible. AI technologies also enable proactive awareness that helps you understand the current state of your systems, helping identify and isolate potential threats before they spread.

Nowadays, speed and power must be guaranteed at the component level. Huawei OceanProtect backup storage series adopts RAID-TP design to achieve full-redundancy on its dual-active controllers, which combine to achieve 6-nines reliability. It supports a remarkably high bandwidth per controller enclosure, meaning data is available when you need it. This is bolstered by intelligent algorithms that protect data assets and full-data lifecycle management on DME's unified UI.

AI holistic designs offer the ability to collect and analyze data in near-real time. Huawei solutions provide a comprehensive six-layer ransomware protection based on network-storage collaboration, a framework that pinpoints vulnerabilities in the system to minimize possible cyber threats. The protection capabilities of the MRP solution have been certified by the Tolly Group, an IT test, validation, and analysis organization. Kevin Tolly, the Group's founder, highlighted the excellent protection offered by the collaborative framework in terms of prevention, response, and recovery.

Best-in-class safeguards can be found throughout an AI-ready system to ensure multi-site protection, and this includes automated failover mechanisms. In addition to high input/output operations per second (IOPS) that enables quick use of clean backups, Huawei solutions can fail over services from the primary site to a secondary or third site in the event of an incident. This is even supported for containers, which can be recovered in just one minute.

Why Huawei

Cyber protection has never been so important than it is in today's world. Considering threats like ransomware-as-a-service, enterprises are being judged on their ability not only to anticipate and prevent incidents, but the speed in which everything is running again. It's a precarious position but one that Huawei relishes in, which is why Huawei solutions provide high availability components, fast recovery, and everything else needed for pre-, during-, and post-event phases.

Learn about our award-winning OceanStor Data Storage and how to unleash the full potential of your data. And stay tuned for more from our AI-ready infrastructure blogs, where we look at how AI-ready infrastructure is shaping industries.

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.