Understanding Huawei Enterprise Storage Concepts

Transcription

1 Understanding Huawei Enterprise Storage Concepts "Secure and Trusted, Flexible and Efficient" 1 Preface Enterprises IT infrastructures are facing new challenges in the era of data explosion. The unexpected growth in services poses demanding requirements on the storage of mission-critical data especially concerning data security, service continuity, and service quality. Enterprises are in need of a more powerful central storage platform that provides complete data protection, extensive services, fast database responses, and enhanced service continuity and availability. To address these challenges, storage systems are required to suit the technological trends of loose coupling, virtualization, high performance, high security, and intelligence. On September 5th, 2012, Huawei launched its OceanStor series enterprise storage system, the first high-end storage system that is solely designed and developed in China. With its cutting-edge technologies, OceanStor series must be able to meet storage challenges for the next 10 years. 2 Huawei Enterprise Storage Concept OceanStor series comprises of three models, OceanStor 18500, OceanStor 18800, and OceanStor 18800F. OceanStor series has topped global rankings with its 1 million IOPS, microsecond-level latency, 20x data recovery speed, and 0 to 5 second RPO. Being a future-oriented storage platform, OceanStor series embodies the concept of being "Secure and Trusted, Flexible and Efficient". The following part of this article will help us better understand this concept.

2 Figure 1 OceanStor series enterprise storage system 2.1 Secure and Trusted, Ensuring Stable Operations of Core Services Reliability and stability are the basic requirements for the storage of mission-critical data which can be met only with an advanced system architecture. Thus, OceanStor series uses a loosely-coupled Smart Matrix architecture with a maximum of 16 controllers operating simultaneously during load balancing. On this architecture, the I/O paths are interconnected without any blocks, the internal exchange bandwidth can reach up to 192 GB/s, and all components and paths are redundant.

3 Figure 2 System architecture of OceanStor series enterprise storage system OceanStor series not only uses Smart Matrix to ensure stable operations of systems in the infrastructure layer, but also Huawei-proprietary RAID 2.0+ virtualization technology to prevent data loss in the data management layer. In RAID 2.0+ technology, RAID group members are not physical disks but divided into many 64 MB logical chunks. When one chunk is faulty, only data on that chunk is reconstructed, so the reconstruction is completed within 3 seconds. When one physical disk is faulty, only the chunks that contain data are reconstructed, the rest are skipped. In addition, the chunks that undergo reconstruction are scattered across multiple physical disks, which, consequentially will participate in the reconstruction. This mechanism accelerates the data reconstruction speed by 20 times, reducing the reconstruction time of 1 TB to within 30 minutes and the risk of data loss by 95%. OceanStor series also supports the Data Integrity extensions (DIX) technology that is jointly produced by Oracle and Emulex to protect against silent data corruption and enhance data integrity and reliability.

4 Reconstruction Time (Hour) Required by 1 TB NL-SAS Data Figure 3 Comparison between reconstruction times of traditional RAID and RAID 2.0+ Although the above mentioned technologies are quite powerful, they are insufficient to create a capable enterprise storage system. The abilities to prevent data loss and ensure service continuity during disaster events are in need.multiple data protection indexes, such as recovery point objective (RPO), can be applied to measure the reliability of an enterprise storage system. An RPO is defined as the maximum amount of acceptable data loss measured in time, so its value should be as low as possible. The synchronous remote replication technology features zero RPO. This technology is widely applied to metropolitan area disaster recovery (DR) for mission-critical data. The asynchronous remote replication technology is used more in DR across cities since it poses relatively low requirements on network bandwidth. The downside of this technology is its high RPO, which usually ranges from 30 to 60 seconds. Customers with high level requirements on service continuity are unsatisfied with such an RPO.

5 To cater to customers' requirements on service continuity, OceanStor series incorporates an optimized remote replication technology which uses an innovative replication policy and a propriety caching algorithm. This technology reduces the RPO of OceanStor series to only 5 seconds, which is 80% shorter than the industry average, remarkably reducing the risk of data loss in the event of a disaster. In addition, OceanStor series delivers a complete suite of DR solutions that cover metropolitan DR, remote DR, two-region three-center DR, and multi-to-one cloud DR for complete service protection. The solutions allow the interoperability among low-end, mid-range, and high-end storage systems, enable the creation of a central DR resource pool, and provide a snapshot function with the highest efficiency in the industry for optimal data protection. 2.2 Flexible and Efficient, Meeting Future Challenges The current age is witnessing an exponential growth in the demand for services and consumption of data, so IT infrastructures must have the scalability to meet such growth. OceanStor series uses a multi-controller architecture to accommodate a maximum of 16 controllers, 3 TB global cache, and 7 PB capacity. Its performance grows linearly with its capacity, so customers' service quality remains high even during peak hours. Solid state drives (SSDs) are another core competence of OceanStor series to relieve its performance bottlenecks. On September 2, 2013, Huawei launched the world s first All-SSD enterprise storage system OceanStor 18800F. This system innovatively uses the SSD-based caching algorithm and data replication policy. With such advanced technologies as the Smart Matrix architecture, global caching, smart quality of service (QoS) policy, and cache partitioning, the system can handle simultaneous requests from 1 million users per microsecond and can prioritize the execution of specified requests, further reducing the service response time. Smart data management is also an attribute required by big data execution. OceanStor series provides a suite of smart features to reduce human interventions: SmartThin allocates capacity to applications on demand, SmartTier tunes system performance according to data access frequencies and service loads, SmartQoS and SmartPartition cooperate to prioritize system

6 resources for key applications to meet their specific performance goals. The Smart software suite greatly improves the storage system management efficiency. In recent times, virtualization is another hot topic of conversation nowadays. Such a large topic of interests experience unpredictable service growth. OceanStor series is further optimized to adapt to the virtualization environment: The VAAI feature reduces the consumption of computing, network, and storage resources, SRM offers remote data protection in virtual environments, VASA improves the production and management efficiency in virtual environments, and HyperSnap works with SmartMotion to facilitate virtual machine deployment. 3 Conclusion HUAWEI OceanStor series is developed based on the "Secure and Trusted, Flexible and Efficient" concept. Since its launch in the market, OceanStor series has been successfully applied globally to both traditional and cloud data centers in various sectors such as government, energy, telecommunications, finance, and manufacturing. OceanStor series' powerful capabilities and impressive features have won it over 100 purchases just within the first year of its launch. In the future, OceanStor series will be further developed to become an integral part of Huawei's a converged data platform. The advanced operating system, data protection functions, and software features in OceanStor series will be introduced into Huawei's mid-range and low-end storage systems which will enhance Huawei's storage product portfolio to produce a unified software platform capable of unique data migration across storage systems of different levels.