MWC: Huawei Unveils Flash Forward Action Plan to Help Enterprises Address Data Challenges in Intelligent Era

At MWC Barcelona 2024, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. unveiled its Flash Forward action plan, which promotes actions related to 3 key areas, namely, all flash for all scenarios, greenness and sustainability, and data resilience and reliability, to help enterprises address various data challenges in the intelligent era.

Applications such as AI, big data, and HPC are constantly unlocking data potential in the digital economy era. This is leading to the growth of data across various industries, placing higher requirements on data infrastructure and making storage a key core element in ICT infrastructure construction.

Storage has entered the all-flash era following the revolution from tape storage to HDD storage. Thanks to its high performance, low power consumption, and high reliability, flash storage is now widely used in multiple core-enterprise-application scenarios. According to Gartner, the global all-flash storage market will account for more than 90% of the storage market by 2026.

Launch of Flash Forward action plan
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Flash Forward action plan proposes actions related to 3 key areas in order to lead non-stop innovation of storage industry:

All flash for all scenarios
New leaps in AI technologies are accelerating the growth of data in government and industries including finance, education, scientific research, healthcare, manufacturing, and the Internet. In addition, the application of data is now expanding from core services to a large number of emerging services. Therefore, to meet data processing requirements in different industry and service application scenarios, the firm proposes F2F2X, the innovative data infrastructure architecture, which advocates all-flash storage for production, backup, and archiving.

The company has also launched a series of next-gen flash storage products:

• OceanStor Pacific 9920, an all-flash scale-out storage system with the industry-leading high capacity density, tailored to hybrid workload scenarios

• OceanStor 5310/5510 capacity flash storage systems, designed for storage and backup of a large amount of business-critical service data

• OceanStor Dorado 2100, entry-level NAS all-flash with active-active architecture, developed to address issues such as slow unstructured data processing and difficult sharing and isolation for small-and medium-sized enterprises

Greenness and sustainability
Huawei data storage adopts a series of innovative measures to improve resource utilization and reduce the impact on the environment.

These measures include:

• Strictly implementing the concept of reducing, reusing, and recycling (3Rs) and reusing renewable materials to reduce packaging weight by 78%
• Improving hardware density and cooling efficiency through hardware innovation, achieving a high density of 24 disks per U and saving 65% more disk space than conventional solutions
• Software to achieve an industry 72:1 data reduction ratio and improving disk utilization to 91% through the exclusive 22+2 elastic EC technology

Data resilience and reliability
The company is committed to building a stable and reliable data foundation to help enterprise users effectively protect their data assets.

• 24/7 services with multi-layer reliability deployment：Huawei SSDs use global wear leveling technology to prevent collective failures of multiple disks and ensure component-level reliability. The SmartMatrix full-mesh architecture is an industry’s first fully-connected front- and back-end architecture. It tolerates the simultaneous failure of up to 7 out of 8 controllers, for high architecture-level reliability. The integrated SAN and NAS active-active gateway-free solution ensures system-level reliability and 24/7 service continuity.

• Building the last line of defense for data resilience with network-storage collaboration：The Multilayer Ransomware Protection (MRP) solution, first developed by the firm, introduces multilayer collaborative data protection capabilities across network and storage. Ransomware detection accuracy reaches 99.9% and recovery bandwidth reaches 172TB/hour thanks to 3 core deployments that safeguard data against the risk of attacks: collaborative network-storage detection, response, and recovery.

Go Green innovation

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Michael Qiu, president, global data storage marketing and solution sales, said: “We hope to inspire customers in various industries to build an efficient, green, resilient, and reliable data infrastructure through our actions related to Flash Forward action plan. This will allow technological innovation to truly benefit industries, helping more enterprises accelerate digital transformation and realize intelligent upgrade.”