All-Flash Data Centers: Fuel Your Production Systems with New-Gen OceanStor Dorado Converged All-Flash Storage

Across the world, IT executives are beginning to recognize the need for all-flash storage in their critical infrastructure. With artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) data expected to dominate storage systems in the next few years, traditional storage techniques have become obsolete, forcing many enterprises to look for alternatives to hybrid storage. 

In the cloud age, all-flash storage has become a key data center infrastructure, delivering the agility, reliability, and scalability needed for modern workloads. For this reason, Huawei invests heavily in R&D (164. 7 billion Chinese yuan in 2023) as part of its mission to build solutions that fuel business growth for companies of all sizes.

In this blog, we look at how production centers have moved to all-flash systems to fuel business-critical services and how Huawei OceanStor Dorado has become a leading option in this space.

Trends of all-Flash production centers

The first step to improving productivity is upgrading the existing storage infrastructure to high-performance all-flash storage. Then, the next step in the shift to all-flash data centers is deploying next-gen technologies like solid-state disks (SSD) which can tap into the potential of huge data reserves. All-flash data center solutions provide excellent performance, efficiency, and durability, making them well-suited to carry ML, AI, and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

SSDs deliver fast speeds across the whole network, with excellent throughput, latency, and input/output operations per second (IOPS). Large-capacity SSDs write data at ~3500 MB/s bandwidth, far outperforming HDDs which run at 120 MB/s. When combined with excellent memory specs, this efficiency improves data access and retrieval speeds data from production and backup sites, allowing companies to obtain accurate capacity predictions from devices across regions and even recover from a potential fault. 

Streamlined operations are possible thanks to simplified networking enabled by high-performance switches. Instead of complex tiered storage architectures, flash devices support NAS, SAN, and multi-cloud setups but without silos and at significantly more I/O operations. Flash devices are becoming more cost-effective with each new generation, making them easy to scale up and out to meet heavy traffic demands. They also come with intelligent management software that provides global visibility of data and cross-region devices. Huawei DME uses a built-in data fabric omni-dataverse global file system, which unifies systems with complete data visibility, manageability, and availability.

The high-reliability and durable SSDs help lower OPEX. Major tech companies are deploying large-scale AI clusters that comprise trillions of parameters, making power consumption a huge issue. Since flash devices use fewer moving parts, they are less likely to overheat, use less power, and require less maintenance, reducing cooling system expenses. This makes a huge impact on carbon emissions caused by electricity output, meaning huge gains in sustainability as enterprises benefit from lower power consumption, TCO, and carbon footprints. 

Key points

The OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage is Huawei's flagship series, offering a range of superb options tailored to enterprises of various sizes. The SmartMatrix 4.0 full-mesh architecture ensures always-on services with high availability and 7-nines system reliability. All-flash storage is instrumental to disaster recovery, offering excellent uplink and downlink bandwidth to prevent data loss or service downtime. In practice, this means zero downtime and—more importantly—zero data loss. Don't believe us? Check out this story from Yapi Kredi, who used OceanStor Dorado to slash TCO by 40%. 

Whatever the choice or budget, all-flash storage doesn't compromise performance. FlashLink® is a set of intelligent disk-controller algorithms that combine to improve computing speed and hit rate while decoupling the data and control planes. The E2E hardware acceleration platform does just that—improves the speed of hardware components, using upgraded hardware, protocols, and symmetric active-active design to achieve over 100 million IOPS and 0.03 ms latency.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash systems are designed to bring mission-critical workloads into the AI era. Offering an excellent foundation for production centers, the system provides a unified protocol and O&M platform that realizes a 5-fold improvement in O&M. To accommodate emerging services, the system for parallel architecture for blocks, files, and object data, negating the need for multiple systems or additional processing loads.


Future-proof data centers

Huawei's Data Storage portfolio is underscored by the New-Gen OceanStor Dorado Converged All-Flash series—a system designed for today's intelligent world and tomorrow's limitless data. The Huawei All-Flash series is built for the digital age, boasting a top portfolio of excellent products that bolster enterprise systems with never-before-seen efficiency and flexibility.

Discover how your business can jump to the next level here.

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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.