China’s Huawei is full of confidence. With the new OceanStor Dorado, European companies should have a serious all-flash storage option. This is done through the three core values of “Extreme Performance,” “Extreme Resilience,” and “AI-ready.”
Huawei has long made a name for itself in the storage market, offering equipment that delivers strong performance while being relatively affordable. In principle, little of that has changed. Still, not every European company will choose Huawei because of concerns about its Chinese roots. That places the company under fire politically, also in Europe, where there are sanctions on network equipment, particularly because of concerns about security. Such sanctions damage its image, something that is not necessarily justified.
Huawei is happy to show that in Paris, France, where it recently held a European conference. One way to show that the brand counts in business was the OceanStor Dorado. This new generation all-flash falls under Huawei’s so-called high-performance pool storage options. Other devices are categorized into the large capacity pool (OceanStor Pacific) and the data protection pool (OceanProtect). You can purchase separate hardware for the latter two categories, but they work together to place each workload best.
Why a new high-performance pool is needed
For OceanStor Dorado, it’s time for a new upgrade. This line has been running since 2010, but business needs have changed dramatically in recent months. Large AI models, in particular, are contributing to this. Infrastructure must be modified to support running the models fully. There must be quick access until the data is on the storage devices, even during the training process. Old hardware cannot efficiently handle the scale of the operation and the desired speed, while new media can make large amounts of structured and unstructured data available quickly. Even after training – within the inferencing process – high performance is essential. That way, input data can be processed quickly, and output can be rapidly generated.
Therefore, today’s storage demands high IOPS and low latency. That’s where all-flash storage comes in. With this storage type, the number of I/O operations to be performed is higher than, for example, the longer-standing HDDs. In addition, latency is below milliseconds, often even in the microsecond range. All-flash, therefore, seems a logical solution for the new giant AI workloads.
Extreme Performance
Huawei translates this change in need with the new generation OceanStor Dorado into something it describes as Extreme Performance. Looking a little further at this name, in practice, it means realizing more than 100 million IOPS and about 0.03 ms latency, a substantial leap from previous generations. For example, the previous OceanStor Dorado family, around three years ago, reached about 21 million IOPS.
Huawei achieved this new performance by shaking up the hardware and software. Inside the new OceanStor Dorado is a data processing unit, also called a SmartNIC. This separates data flows from control flows. The CPU is thus less burdened with tasks it is not generally designed for – that is what the SmartNIC is now for. Furthermore, the OceanStor Dorado relies on Huawei’s algorithm, which is tailored for the new generation. The algorithm looks at how it can optimize performance. For example, are there steps to improve read and write performance?
Ready for AI
With the second premise – AI-Ready – Huawei additionally emphasizes AI capabilities. This is also a way of describing that the OceanStor Dorado is AI-enabled. For example, the storage environment features error detection and advanced diagnostics based on artificial intelligence to identify and resolve anomalies faster. This can lead to less downtime and lower operational costs. On the slide below, Huawei outlines several AI-driven features.
In addition to the algorithm discussed, AI capabilities include a Data Management Engine. This engine makes Operations & Maintenance (O&M) tasks at storage run faster. This is done by relying on dialog-based O&M, where management is done more through chatbots rather than complex dashboards. As a result, the number of steps for management tasks promises to decrease significantly. On top of that, the engine introduces the ability to collect and analyze logs faster so that errors can be detected within minutes.
Extreme Resilience
Finally, to stay within Huawei’s marketing terms, the final component is Extreme Resilience. In this area, the OceanStor Dorado achieves a single-node reliability of 99.99999 percent. This puts Huawei at the top of the market. Huawei claims this: “No data loss and no impact on hosts upon the failure of any controller enclosure, any disk enclosure, or any bay.”
To achieve this, the full-mesh architecture of the storage devices has been revamped. The disk enclosure contains multiple storage media, while the controller enclosure contains the storage controllers that manage communication between the disks. These things are completely decoupled from each other within the new architecture, which has high fault tolerance. If seven of the eight controller enclosures fail, the system continues to operate.
However, storage systems today are also expected to protect against ransomware. After all, companies can take many security steps on the front end through tools, but ultimately, it is the storage devices where the valuable data resides. As such, it is the last location to build resilience. Thus, the OceanStor Dorado applies detection for SAN and NAS. For the first option, the system relies on abnormal I/O behavior; for the second, it applies file filtering. This leads to detection rates of 96 percent and 99.99 percent, respectively.
Gaining trust
With these steps, Huawei shows that it can technically meet modern needs. There are also plenty of organizations that trust Huawei’s storage products. For example, it can provide figures from regulated industries where Huawei is widely chosen. There are thousands of customers worldwide, including from the financial services and healthcare sectors. Still, Huawei hopes to gain a wider market share in Europe, the company confirmed at the conference.
Distrust of the Chinese brand should not be a roadblock in the company’s view. Security concerns are unjustified, show independent audits Huawei points out. These audits guarantee transparency and reliability. The third-party audit confirms that the OceanStor Dorado meets the highest security standards. It results in certifications that reassure customers and governments about the solution’s reliability.
On the other hand, Huawei points out that it has no access to the data stored in the OceanStor Dorado systems. Huawei acts purely as a technology supplier. Ownership lies entirely with the customer, who controls all data. In addition, the products are guaranteed to meet European data standards.
All in all, the OceanStor Dorado takes new technological steps that should strengthen Huawei’s position on the storage map. The brand insists on being a reliable partner for European companies, so we are curious to see whether the new product will also mark a new chapter in Huawei’s history.
Tip: Huawei polishes European image, sees opportunities in intelligent future