Recap of Huawei Connect 2024

The annual flagship Huawei conference, Huawei Connect, took place in Shanghai, China, a few days ago and it was the opportunity for the Chinese giant to update users and partners. The main topic was “Amplify Intelligence” surfing on the AI acronym. Numbers of attendees we heard approached 20,000 people, all included.

Keynotes introduced key evolution moments in the earth development with the 4 revolution: 1/ Mechanization 2/ Electrification 3/ “Informatization” and 4/ Digital and Intelligent Transformation. People come from all the planet even if some geopolitical pressure tried to limit the vendor’s market footprint.

Speaking with various prospects and users from all industries, it appears that the feedback is very positive regarding performance, resiliency and globally features offered. Huawei is strong in finance services, telecom and public sector.

The fact that Huawei can offer a variety of product remains a key factor for users wishing to reduce the number of providers. It is true for networking, computers, storage and even other product line with phone, communications and associated solutions.

Regarding storage, with of course some AI related workloads, the firm took advantage of its big show to announce and refresh some products. The storage philosophy still surfs on the 6 dimensions introduced a few months ago: security, AI and efficiency that extend the original 3: performance, capacity and resiliency.

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The OceanStor Pacific line with its 9928 model receives 36 NVMe SSDs of 61.44TB in 2U chassis for a total of 2PB raw and 4PB with a conservative 2:1 compression ratio. This density is one of the best today on the market for one node solution.

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In terms of scalability it scales up to 4,096 nodes and each of them can deliver 2.4 million IO/s and 90GB/s of throughput. Of course, the product is a multi protocol storage offering block, file and object and even HDFS. It offers up to +4 erasure coding protection schema. And we can imagine the final capacity when the 128TB SSD announced in Berlin, Germany, last May will be available.

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The A800, the AI Storage, and other lines like IVS, OceanProtect, CyberProtect and other services like DME and GFS got some extensions and updates. GFS was renamed Omni-Dataverse and will be coupled with DME in October. GFS is currently limited to Huawei storage product and will accept Dell PowerScale and ECS and Lustre next year. DME IQ promotes cloud integration and O&M platform.

Since the show, the MLCommons consortium published MLPerf v1.0 benchmark results with 13 participating organizations, very different in terms of product offerings with software or hardware, files and block storage, so not an immediate comparison. Huawei delivers the highest throughput with the A800.

This new architecture is fully disaggregated leveraging DPU-based model with front-end and back-end layers. One cluster can grow up to 64 controllers and 4 controllers represent one engine on 4U. With SmartMatrix 4.0, all back-end modules are connected to thousands of NVMe SSDs with 100GbE RoCE v2 connectivity and establish a flat namespace with an implicit dynamic N+M erasure coding technique. It is a shared everything approach as all controllers can talk to all drives fueled by a global memory. Everything is active in the design, working in parallel in this fully symmetric philosophy.

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The main push in storage was related to the Dorado full flash storage and its v7 architecture. On the front-end side, as a multi protocol solution, several access methods are exposed like block and file protocols or S3 API all running on the DPU-based SmartNIC with TCP offload and encryption as well. This is what is named FlashLink 3.0 separating data and control flows. Coupling these 2 techniques deliver low latency. The team insisted on FlashEver 2.0 to facilitate cross generation upgrade and migration from the v6 model.

The Huawei storage product line, essentially with Dorado and Pacific Series, illustrates pretty well the U3 – Universal, Unified and Ubiquitous – storage model we predicted more than 10 years ago confirming by several vendors’ offerings.