Carmakers Prioritize Cost Reduction with STaaS Solution
Part 2 of our blog series detailing the advantages of Storage as a Service (STaaS) in various industry scenarios.
Part 1: Carrier Case Study: Huawei STaaS Reduces TCO by 20%
The era of automotive intelligence has dawned.
Digital, technology-driven transformation is essential to the innovation and growth of the automotive industry. In recent years, carmakers have been focusing on higher operational efficiency and user experience, lower overall costs, better business models, and digital ecosystem development to achieve future-proof competitiveness.
One car company has achieved significant reductions in storage procurement and operating costs with the help of Huawei Storage as a Service (STaaS) solution, becoming a prime example for car companies to use STaaS solutions.
The company is a top truck provider in Europe. Continuous service expansion has posed significant challenges to its IT infrastructure, resulting in issues such as difficulties with rapid infrastructure expansion and unbalanced resource usage. Data volume is growing faster than expected. For instance, the intelligent truck analysis system, which handles the real-time integration and application of global truck informationm — including driving duration, engine temperature, tire replacements, load information, and engine rotational speed — faces exponentially increasing data as truck sales rise. This growth places substantial pressure on the company's storage system.
The company planned to build its own STaaS system by drawing on industry-leading experience in storage procurement and operations. In its storage framework procurement project, it required each supplier to propose viable solutions that would support its needs for continuous and in-depth digitalization while minimizing investment costs.
After a thorough analysis of its live network, Huawei identified several issues with the company's storage usage:
- High OPEX due to old devices consuming huge equipment space and power
- Insufficient performance to meet growing service needs
- Severe labor shortages
Regardless of the storage solution selected, the company’s priority is choosing the right storage device—one that delivers high performance, robust reliability, and easy management. Huawei addresses these needs with its OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage products. Featuring Huawei's patented FlashLink® technology, the OceanStor Dorado products outperform the industry's next-best by 10% to 30% for the same investment. This significantly enhances Company S's Intelligent Truck Analytics System, which manages over 500,000 vehicles and processes data at rates up to 6 GB per second.
OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage uses the front-end and back-end active-active architecture where all controllers and disks participate in I/O reads and writes, ensuring peak performance with no wasted components. In addition, the resilience of OceanStor Dorado met the company’s requirements. The gateway-free active-active feature provides up to 99.99999% reliability and 99.99% ransomware detection capabilities, providing a solid safeguard for its data. Furthermore, in tests by the company, OceanStor Dorado's high deduplication and compression ratios have reduced energy consumption and space usage by over 40%.
STaaS solution maximizes storage resource utilization
Huawei designed a customized STaaS solution for the company to optimize storage resource utilization. It categorizes resources into five performance levels: Flash, UltraPerf, Perf, Standard, and Capacity. To implement more precise resource management for the company, this solution incorporated RAID6 and RAID-TP disk protection options and added two levels for high-end and mid-range products. As a result, the resources are classified into 4 major categories and 20 sub-categories. Each sub-category has defined minimum capacities to align with application needs.
Billing for each application is conducted internally on a per-TB-per-year basis, as the purchases resources from Huawei semi-annually based on storage requirements. The STaaS platform provides functions such as one-click resource application, metered billing, and quick provisioning. Additionally, Huawei storage's support for non-disruptive data migration addresses concerns related to application performance upgrades. The monitoring function of Huawei STaaS platform allows users to quickly obtain their resource usage and future capacity expansion plans, bolstering the company’s long-term growth.
Conclusion
As storage technology and research evolve, storage vendors like Huawei are expanding beyond conventional providers of high-speed, stable, and high-capacity storage devices. The future of storage lies in enhanced management, operational efficiency, and AI integration. Looking to the future, Huawei will continue to innovate and deliver more cost-effective, efficient, resilient, and intelligent storage solutions to empower your business to grow and thrive for today and tomorrow.
Learn more about Huawei's All-Flash Data Storage solutions.
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.
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