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Huawei tops DCIG's 2021 Enterprise All-Flash Storage Buyer’s Guide

Oceanstor Dorado ‘quickly became storage standard’

Sponsored Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage was awarded the highest distinction in DCIG’s 2020-21 Enterprise All-Flash Array Buyer’s Guide – the ‘Recommended’ ranking.

DCIG, a leading ICT consulting firm, provide comprehensive, in-depth analysis and recommendations of various cloud, enterprise data storage, and enterprise data protection technologies.

The DCIG Buyer’s Guide provides a third-party assessment of products by objectively evaluating and ranking their features from an end user’s perspective. It is an important reference for global data centre buyers to quickly identify the most appropriate products during infrastructure procurement.

Huawei has achieved increasing success in recent years in DCIG ‘Recommended’ ranking of all-flash arrays and products. This growing recognition from DCIG is part of a global trend. Huawei all-flash storage has achieved the highest growth rate for the global all-flash market for several consecutive quarters. The high quality of its products has received praise from users and analysis organisations worldwide. Huawei has become an industry leader with its innovative development of storage products.

How the DCIG Buyer’s Guide ranks products Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado V6 Series and OceanStor F V5 Series have achieved the ranking of Recommended. The OceanStor Dorado V6 was released last year as the next generation of Huawei’s high-end all-flash storage. Its ranking here represents the rapid recognition it has received from standard analysis organizations. Let’s take a look at DCIG’s scoring criteria.

The DCIG Buyer's Guide comprehensively evaluates and ranks mainstream all-flash arrays with diverse criteria, such as Acquisition and Deployment Options, Management and Software, Hardware, Automation and Integration, and Proactive Support and Predictive Analytics. DCIG evaluates and scores the products to place them into two groups: ‘Recommended’ or ‘Excellent’. All-flash storage arrays with the best performance are designated as ‘Recommended’.

DCIG evaluations are based in part on the constantly evolving expectations of enterprises regarding their technology infrastructure. Data is critical to virtually all business operations and has grown to become even more important. It is now a key tactical and strategic resource and forms the foundation for value creation. Only storage products built with an understanding of the new importance of data can lead the industry.

These new storage products must provide enterprises with performance, capacity, and continuous availability. They must also go a step further by transforming storage ownership experience with new storage acquisition and deployment options, non-disruptive upgrades, predictive analytics, and proactive support.

All-flash arrays have been rapidly developing in response to these needs in the past five years. The skyrocketing capacity of flash media and continuous innovative breakthroughs in software and hardware architecture have helped all-flash arrays make a quantum leap in product capabilities. Earlier premium products are being phased out by the market due to their inability to match the pace of technological evolution. Companies like Huawei have seized this opportunity with continuous product breakthroughs to rapidly win industry recognition.

Huawei OceanStor All-Flash Storage

In 2019, Huawei officially launched the OceanStor Dorado Series as its next high-end generation of all-flash products. It has quickly become a storage standard with significant breakthroughs in architecture to achieve the highest performance in the industry at 20,000,000 IOPS and a stable latency of 0.08 milliseconds. It integrates AI technologies to push all-flash arrays to new heights with extensive storage functions.

The DCIG Buyer's Guide has revealed that the new generation of enterprise all-flash arrays has widely adopted NVMe for storage OS optimisation, SSDs, and NVMe-oF protocols to improve performance. NVMe technology vastly improves latency in comparison to first generation all-flash arrays.

The OceanStor Dorado Series achieves an industry first by implementing E2E NVMe with support for multiple protocols, such as NVMe over FC and NVMe over RoCE V2 for storage and host networks. It implements a 100G RDMA interconnection between controller enclosures and NVMe disk enclosures for industry-leading speed. Its high-end all-flash storage optimizes the processor for NVMe multi-queue polling and processes multiple concurrent I/Os without locks. Storage and network layers are optimized with E2E NoF+ to shorten the data transmission path, improve system concurrency, and boost overall service efficiency by 30%. New smart disk enclosures are customized for NVMe SSDs to greatly accelerate data reconstruction for disk failures by completing reconstruction within disk enclosures.

The OceanStor Dorado Series capitalises on the widespread adoption and optimization of E2E NVMe to create data highway networking for unified data transmission and processing. Huawei's all-NVMe-oF solution surpasses other vendors with faster detection and recovery to further increase the reliability of data highways with continuous performance assurance. It unlocks the performance potential of flash memory to meet the increasing demands of data center applications.

DCIG evaluates stability and reliability in the context of digital transformation. Data and the continuous availability of the systems for that data are critical to virtually all business operations. As a result, the most important DCIG criteria for stability and reliability are the non-disruptive upgrade capability, including controller code upgrades, controller replacement, node addition, and data migration.

The OceanStor Dorado Series is one of the few all-flash arrays ranked as Recommended that can achieve six-nines (99.9999%) availability.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado Series achieves high availability for all-flash arrays with E2E reliability architecture at the component, architecture, product, solution, and cloud levels. System reliability reaches up to 99.9999% for ample support of core services with high reliability requirements in finance, telecoms, government, and manufacturing.

In addition, DCIG evaluation focuses on automation, predictive analytics, and proactive support. These capabilities combine to prevent service interruption, improve the availability of storage arrays, and make storage arrays more intelligent by simplifying storage management.

The diverse evaluation criteria of DCIG shows the growing importance of intelligent storage arrays with a variety of features, such as AT and machine learning. AI optimizes storage resources for arrays using comprehensive allocation and scheduling with intelligent management in resource planning, performance monitoring, system optimization, risk prediction, and fault location.

The Huawei OceanStor Dorado Series is also an industry leader in intelligent storage arrays. The built-in AI hardware platform and intelligent algorithms provide powerful computing and build an intelligent learning framework for storage systems to continuously analyze service loads and device health status.

For example, the storage system provides intelligent read cache with intelligent learning. Deep learning algorithms identify and prefetch data flows by space, time, and semantics to increase the read cache hit by 50%. The storage system utilizes a powerful AI chip to perform training and learning with complex models while processing services normally.

The Huawei OceanStor Dorado Series provides an AI management system with three layers to utilize AI technologies to train and learn device alarms and log data after customer authorization. This provides intelligent assurance, health analytics in real time, and intelligent fault prevention to greatly reduce system risks and improve storage management efficiency by over five times.

The innovations of the OceanStor Dorado Series exceed the high expectations of DCIG for all-flash arrays to receive the ranking of Recommended.

DCIG Predicts the Future of the All-Flash Market The steady market growth of enterprise-grade storage has made all-flash storage arrays a global focus of attention. Their growing importance is due to both their exceptional growth rate and far-reaching impact on data center infrastructure in recent years. All-flash arrays have become the key to controlling the future storage market.

The DCIG 2020-21 Enterprise All-Flash Array Buyer’s Guide states that customer requirements for all-flash arrays go beyond hardware indicators, such as performance, capacity, and reliability. There is a growing focus on soft power, such as automation, predictive analytics, proactive support, hybrid cloud convergence, and persistent storage for containers. The shift to a more comprehensive focus drives further innovation for all-flash arrays and accelerates the elimination of traditional arrays.

There is a new period of differentiation ahead for global all-flash storage. Competitors with traditional all-flash arrays have lacked strong market performance in recent years and are being increasingly phased out. In contrast, vendors like Huawei are becoming the industry leader by embracing continuous product innovation to meet the constantly shifting demands of data centers with high-speed growth.

Huawei has achieved the highest growth rate in the global all-flash market for several consecutive quarters as one of the fastest growing vendors in the industry. While most global storage vendors experienced a revenue decline in Q1 2020, Huawei storage continued to excel with a growth rate of 24.7%. Huawei all-flash storage also showed an exceptional market growth at 45.1%, surpassing average market growth by a wide margin. The OceanStor Dorado Series is being applied to data centers on a global scale. More and more customers are realizing the potential of Huawei storage to embrace a brighter future.

View the DCIG 2020-21 Enterprise All-Flash Array Buyer’s Guide.

Discover more: OceanStor Dorado.

Sponsored by Huawei

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