Brazilian Power Giant Copel Turns to Huawei

In response to spikes in customer transactions, the Brazilian power company Copel – officially, Companhia Paranaense de Energia – has placed a pair of Huawei OceanStor Dorado 8000 AFAs at the heart of its new service and storage system.

As the third largest electric power company in Brazil, and the largest company in the state of Paraná, Copel is responsible for powering its entire state, operating everything from power gen and transmission systems, to transformation and distribution systems.

Yet, recent surges in customer growth rendered Copel’s legacy systems unable to cope with increasing transaction loads. After researching an upgrade path, the company decided that its new storage infrastructure needed to support at least 150,000 IO/s – with a latency of no more than 1ms – and have de-dupe and compression enabled.

In terms of load balancing, Copel decided that LUNs should not be bound to specific controllers, and that the system had to be able to support 24/7 continuity.

Traditional storage systems were not up the task, so Copel opted for 2 OceanStor Dorado 8000 V6 all-flash NVMe arrays, deployed across 2 data center sites. Even with de-dupe and compression enabled, the systems still deliver sub-millisecond latency. And with Huawei’s HyperMetro gateway-free active-active connectivity technology, failover is ensuring that operations remain uninterrupted.

Active-active architecture promises fully balanced loads, data volumes, and hot data. This is achieved through a combination of a load balancing algorithm, front-end distribution, write cache, and a storage pool. Such architecture also negates the need for a traditional gateway, further reducing costs, while ensuring zero RPO and RTO during DR.

Copel has all the tools it needs to cope with growing transaction loads. Moreover, Huawei has helped prepare the company with a system built to last, one that will serve as a foundation for further growth in the future.