Huawei Storage: Embrace OpenStack, change for the cloud

Forrester Research argues that cloud data services will overtake traditional storage. However, according to Huawei's market performance in the 2014, traditional storage still has huge growth space. Executives at Huawei's storage division believe that the Cloud's essence is service, and that the cloud of software functionality (that is, service) is the way to achieve high-performance, high-capacity, highly scalable, and high-reliability.

"Do not say cloud and large data, only said that the calculation and storage of two devices market space a year also close to 100 billion dollars, there is enough room for me to play." "Recalling Huawei's 2010 entry into the enterprise IT market," said Huang, Huawei's IT product line marketing Engineering minister. But when cloud computing gradually into the traditional enterprise, even the 12306.cn has been tested water Aliyun, still emphasize the storage itself, suitable for the timely?

Huawei Storage in the 2014

Understanding Huawei's performance in the 2014 will make it more convincing to see Huawei's views.

Huawei China Area Enterprise business IT Solution Sales Department Chief engineer Penco, Huawei Storage 2014 Q3 both at home and abroad have a good performance, its China region to achieve revenue growth (43.3%), the number of shipments of growth (75%), Delivery capacity growth (129.5%) Many first ( The absolute value of the rankings are 2,2,3, in the overseas market is harvested more than 100 million U.S. dollars in the market.

In the depth of storage, Huawei is in addition to financial, government, energy, transportation, media, education and other industries stand firm, its high-end storage growth reached 120%, and has broken through the central bank and the four major lines, three major operators and other core areas, the integration of more than 150,000 stores in the network, in addition to mass storage shipments more than 100 sets ( Total capacity exceeding 60PB). 2014, Huawei released the Oceanstor V3 Fusion storage products, for the first time to put forward the multi-format integration, performance and capacity integration, data value fusion, data lifecycle integration, the concept of multi-vendor device integration, it appears to be popular in the competition with the peer's integrated storage solutions.

"Our 31.7% ratio is to replace the competitor's storage products in the net, and then take the list down after PK." I believe that this ratio will be further improved this year. "Huawei Storage product line President Fan said.

Gartner also gave a high rating on Huawei's storage performance, and in its 2014 storage Magic Quadrant, Huawei's Universal disk array was first among the challenger quadrants. In view of Gartner's emphasis on data, case and customer testimonials, Huawei's storage technology and market performance are both remarkable.

Memory trends in Huawei's eyes

Compared to traditional local applications, SaaS companies will gain more from their cloud services, according to Forrester Research. The reason is that traditional local applications are limited by their own local storage space, while cloud data services are more open. The cost of cloud data services is relatively low, and in order to achieve effective development, enterprises will also study to reduce their expenditure.

New IT application patterns that hit user pain points are more robust than traditional models, such as the recent popularity of SaaS vendors in capital markets, but that does not mean that local storage will disappear immediately. Huang about Huawei's two opportunities in the IT field: one is that Huawei has been almost alone in the field of communication, and needs to find new growth points; the second is that it market space is large enough, and Huawei's accumulation provides the foundation for building IT capabilities, while the IT market is facing major changes in cloud computing, big data, It is a good time for new players to enter and change the rules and market patterns of the game.

"At present and in the next few years, real money to buy enterprise storage or mainstream, do simple management, data flow easier." After all, the data will run on the (internal) system. "Huang said.

In response to the introduction of new models and technologies, Huang also said that there are many manufacturers of internet technology and open source technology products to try to do enterprise applications, but most of the manufacturers are failures, because those from Google, Facebook and other companies of excellent open source technology is often targeted at their business and it architecture design, Although the distributed technology, mass system management technology, but not enough versatility, in the traditional application compatibility is very poor, not suitable for enterprise-class application scenarios. Amazon, for example, gets an order from the CIA, and in fact it can only solve 1% of the load, and if customers say that using Google's Distributed File system, the server's choice is limited, otherwise it will not be able to achieve the scalability of the software. Therefore, another choice is the gradual introduction of new technologies by enterprises and traditional manufacturers.

Talking about the current hyper-fusion architecture for deploying cloud infrastructure, Huang that the two trends across enterprise IT, one through virtualization into resource pools, then with clouds and then into mixed clouds. Another is to buy software, the hope that the calculation of network storage after the integration of its performance to maximize the management of the simplest. This shows a large cloud layered architecture, virtual machine virtualization after a server into 20 servers, each server must have a managed virtual network, drive network and storage virtualization.

From the point of view of the entire data center infrastructure, Huang that there will be changes in the software definition and hardware reconfiguration proposed by the industry, CPU interface, Flash will have more and more impact on storage. From the design of the entire architecture, like a chip that allows 32 CPUs to share a large pool of storage resources, this architecture, a large memory pool with multiple CPUs to share together. These architectural changes include the software definition of the IOC (also a card with a chip on it, as long as I use the software to tell it that FC is FC, to tell it is ether), including architectural design (many customers will walk across the rack to design the basic unit of the data center, There are also customers who feel that the entire architecture is too complex to carry, as well as distributed computing, distributed storage, distributed networks, and distributed databases. Huawei has proposed a VDC (Virtual data center) concept that multiple VDC based on a large pool can be more flexible to meet different business requirements.

But there is still a problem: cloud data Services and local storage coexist, which means the hybrid cloud architecture is popular, then, traditional for local performance and function optimization, and cloud data between a fault. In fact, EMC and NetApp have foreseen this, and they have come up with their own hybrid cloud strategy in 2014, all from the perspective of "Data architecture and data mobility in different clouds", forming a "public cloud-mixed cloud-private cloud" for the next 5-10 years. Data migration, data protection, data utilization, and even the forward-looking prediction of the "cloud flow" of data in mixed application mode.

Throughout the 2014, Huawei did not talk about hybrid clouds as highly as EMC and NetApp. Huawei at the HCC 2014 (2014 Huawei Cloud Computing Conference) proposed the concept of "business-driven storage", making it clear that storage should be determined by business requirements. Huang said that the key to achieve data flow is the sharing of technology and modules, including flash algorithms, distributed clusters, and so on, different servers of SSD, memory and hard disk can be created horizontal resource pool.

How to do well the storage of cloud times

The so-called business-driven, Huawei approach is to innovate with the support of customers. "The final decision is the client. "Huang said.

In particular, Huawei communicates with many industry customers for innovation and joint alignment, such as ICBC, China Merchants Bank, PetroChina, telecom operators have a very strong application team, have their own detailed planning, have their own view of the trend, Huawei hopes that customer feedback on Huawei's own planning to play a corrective role, Huawei has told them what plans have changed and what technology has to be introduced to allow customers to lead Huawei's decisions. One important thing in 2015, Huang says, is the deepening of industry solutions.

In this process, the application of compatibility, open source technology, especially the support of OpenStack, Huawei mentioned a high position. Huang introduced, Huawei now has 300,000 virtual machine a cloud support seven kinds of applications, actually choose the easiest to do under the research and development environment first, leaving more than 500 kinds of complex applications need a process, involving organization, process, performance, business compatibility, reliability, etc. slowly migrated over, But the road will eventually have manufacturers based on new technology to meet all enterprise applications, Huawei is slowly approaching this goal.

For open source, Huang that the most technical difference between Chinese and Indian engineers and American engineers is the ability to design the architecture, which can be learned from open source. The OpenStack architecture, he says, is a very nice decoupled architecture that can decouple the upper and lower layers, perhaps the only open architecture that can compete with Amazon. However, he believes that with the OpenStack framework does not mean that open source things can be used directly, there must be large companies for it to achieve reliability, manageability of the reinforcement. After the API definition, Huawei has invested in computational virtualization, software definition storage, and software definition networks, providing customers with an open cloud architecture.

We also learned that Huawei Storage Asia's largest compatibility lab has also played a big role in building industry solutions. It is reported that many of the business of the compatibility laboratory will be moved to the Internet, then anyone can log on directly from the Internet, Huawei virtualization, cloud computing, storage all the configuration use, can experience online.

For the implementation of hyper-fusion, Huang fusioncube for SAP Hana example, it can be different servers of SSD, memory and hard disk into a horizontal resource pool, priority in local access, can be extended to thousands of nodes, to meet the Zhejiang Telecom customers to 2PB resource pool needs. But Huawei would prefer the solution to expand in the cloud, focusing on oceanstor, especially V3, as the best high-end storage in the enterprise, rather than dismantling the software to store it for sale.

Fan from a performance and capacity perspective of Huawei's high-end storage efforts. Computational virtualization and the proliferation of data volumes and business classes have increased the pressure on storage access by hosts several times. In the general financial system now do a second to deal with more than 100,000 of the bills read or write operations, ICBC proposed to deal with 300,000 different business concurrency requirements per minute. Huawei's high performance comes from the 16Gb FC/56GB IB host interface, the PCI 3.0 internal bus, the 12GB SAS hard drive interface and Intel's latest Lvy bridge processor, as well as Huawei's own software development capabilities, including RAID 2.0+ global load Balancing, Smart series efficiency enhancement software, cache algorithm optimization and IO path optimization. Fan revealed that so far Huawei has brought together the United States, Russia, the European Institute and the National Institute of all the power to carry out effective code management, development process quality control.

Capacity, Oceanstor 9000 maximum capacity to do 40PB, system design to achieve 60PB. Fan smile, realize the 40PB four steps: First find some tin box, 288 boxes, plug in more than 10,000 hard drives, and then a number of CPU and memory, feel the performance of the SSD disk acceleration, and then write 10 million lines of code, the core technology is distributed system.

But the hardships are not known to outsiders. Fan regrets.

The key to storage system is reliability, when the performance of the storage system is very high, how to guarantee the stability of the product? This is a torture to the storage vendor. "For so many years, Huawei has been doing this to provide a stable, easy-to-use, future-oriented storage system that is a competitive technology," says Fan. ”

Summary

In terms of market targets, Huawei is not confined to China, but focuses on the world--from the display language of all the exhibition walls of HCC 2014, both Chinese and English, and the presence of six languages. Open Horizons also decided that Huawei in the technical focus on the international standards, will be more than 10% of the annual revenue into research and development, strengthen the cloud, large data and open source technology support, at the same time exerting high end, with EMC, IBM, HDS and other veteran strong confrontation.

From a service point of view, Huawei is also focused on listening to the voice of its customers, to provide a "business-driven" overall solution. The only deficiency, it may be that Huawei has led the industry trend-emphasizing that challenging EMC in the high-end market and meeting the needs of its users, rather than telling users how to transform into the cloud, how to merge with the public cloud, the hybrid cloud, is a barrier that Huawei needs to overcome in its path toward leadership.

Of course, from Huawei's usual style, the low-key company has been accumulating technology in a pragmatic way, and when the time is right, it will attack. According to Fan revealed that the 2015 Huawei storage in the cloud will have more action, let us look forward to it.