Huawei OceanStor Dorado V6 All-flash Storage

ESG asked flash users what benefits their organization has realized as a result of deploying flash storage. Improved application performance was the most common response (48%) followed by improved total cost of ownership (47%).1 When leveraging the NVMe protocol, flash storage environments can experience reduced latencies and higher overall performance. Participants familiar with NVMe were asked to identify which objectives were the motivation behind their interest in NVMe (see Figure 1). The most common response was a desire to overall “future proof” the environment (56%), narrowly edging out improving the performance of existing applications (55%).

In the same survey, respondents were asked to name their top storage challenges and the top four most identified block storage-related (SAN) challenges for 2019 are hardware costs (30%), data protection (27%), data placement (24%), and rapid data growth (24%). All these issues have been at or near the top of the list since 2015. The overarching issues that drive these data storage concerns are relatively unchanged—data growth is accelerating, and the resulting infrastructure required to store and protect that data is costly and complex.

Organizations are tasked with providing a high-quality, predictable, and productive computing environment for an ever- growing number of internal users and external customers. In addition, enterprise application environments have become increasingly unpredictable as their underlying IT infrastructure grows in complexity and size. Mission-critical business application performance is sensitive to storage performance and latency, and highly dependent on the resilience of the IT environment. The ability to consolidate critical workloads and functions onto a single all-flash storage system has proven to provide significant TCO benefits if an organization’s performance, reliability, and operational requirements can be met. While many storage vendors offer all-flash solutions, the design decisions and tradeoffs made by these vendors can result in very different system capabilities and ultimately tradeoffs in benefits to an organization.

Huawei designed the OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage to handle mission-critical applications, both internal and customer- facing, for large enterprises, as well as mixed workloads. The OceanStor Dorado leverages a multiple controller, end-to-end non-volatile memory express (NVMe) architecture they call SmartMatrix to reduce the latency in accessing NVMe and flash- based storage and ensure high availability. It can scale out since the OceanStor Dorado V6 supports up to 32 controllers.