Huawei introduces all-flash OceanStor Dorado arrays

Huawei has recently introduced a new kind of storage array, precisely engineered for high-performance and stable environments and the ability to support organisations' rapid digital growth.

Huawei explains that sectors such as retail and financial services must all adapt to ever-higher service levels across mobile and application interfaces. These sectors are also facing tougher regulations for data protection and availability.

In order to quickly adapt to these challenges, organisations must improve their performance and response speed when it comes to capturing, processing, and storing customer data – all the while keeping the total cost of ownership (TCO) low.

All-flash is one way that many organisations are dealing with these challenges. All-flash offers stability and high-performance storage with extremely low levels of latency – and it can offer reliability in the event of a disaster.

The Huawei all-flash OceanStor Dorado arrays feature a multi-controller, it is fully-interconnected and shares architecture design that runs from the front end to the back end.

"The all-flash array family is divided into different product types according to the number of controllers, controller cache, number of front-end interfaces, and the maximum number of hot-swappable I/O modules. The arrays have five separate chips that drive performance and reliability. These include the Kinpeng 920 processor compute chip, an AI chip, a network chip, SSD controller chip, and a management chip.

Furthermore, the OceanStor Dorado also provides fault-tolerance features and a one-second switchover with uninterrupted links in the event of controller failure.

To meet these requirements, OceanStor Dorado has been tuned to exceed the previous-generation product, reaching 20 million IOPS and 0.1 ms latency, thanks to the Kunpeng 920 chip, the

CoreFarm intelligent scheduling algorithm, and the Ascend A310 chip's self-acceleration of data storage.

Huawei also designed the OceanStor Dorado to overcome a common storage error: Storage controller failure.

Huawei explains, "Many storage systems can manage two simultaneous failures in controllers, but that may not be adequate in a scenario where an entire controller enclosure experiences failure or shuts down suddenly – which often involves the simultaneous failure of multiple controllers.

OceanStor Dorado can scale up to 32 controllers, which means in the event of a fault the core service system is not interrupted.

One company that deployed OceanStor Dorado is Swiss insurance firm CSS Insurance. It previously used all-flash arrays and data centers to improve its operational efficiency – however its storage arrays eventually hit their maximum performance levels of 150,000 IOPS. The company had forecast the need for a minimum of 300,000 IOPS.

The company deployed Huawei's Dorado all-flash storage system, which delivered 600,000 IOPS performance and a single millisecond of latency. CSS Insurance also achieved 40TB capacity, with more room for future growth.

Join Huawei at its APAC FSI Data Storage Online Summit on 13 August. Click here for more details.