Huawei Philippines launched its artificial intelligence-optimized storage solutions during the celebration of the Huawei IT Day held at Shangri-La, The Fort on May 23.
The event, themed “Unleash Data Power Towards the Intelligent Era,” drew over 200 attendees from various industries eager to learn about Huawei’s latest product innovations and technology trends.
“Over the past year, our world has changed dramatically, and these changes have affected the digital world in various forms, and further affected our lives,” said Standy Nie, Director of Enterprise Business Group, Huawei Philippines.
Among the solutions introduced are the Data Center Solutions (DCS) and the OceanProtect Backup Appliance.
DCS is a full-stack data center solution that virtualizes environment that leverages the power of Huawei’s full-stack capabilities from energy consumption to IT equipment designed to help enterprises embrace modern data centers and provide solid digital infrastructure to help lay foundation towards digitalization, by building greener, more reliable, more efficient, and more intelligent data centers.
OceanProtect Appliance is a Huawei storage that is purpose built for backup.
Due to its innovation, it boasts of a premium data reduction ratio of up to 72:1 — 20% better than the industry’s next best — helping customers save space even when working on a budget.
Addressing the escalating stringent storage demands requiring performance and availability, Huawei re-introduced its award winning high-end All Flash Arrays (AFA) storage, OceanStor Dorado. Engineered for high performance, it promises optimized resource utilization with advanced management capabilities serving as a cornerstone for mission-critical services in the modern enterprise ecosystem.
Huawei Philippines’ Chief Technology Officer, Arnie Alvarez, delved into the paradigm shift brought by AI in data storage. He said, “Since the 1990s, enterprise applications have evolved significantly, moving from single hosts, databases, virtualization, and file sharing to incorporating big data and high-performance data analytics (HPDA). This evolution has driven a shift in data storage technologies from DAS, SAN, and NAS to unstructured data storage. With the rise of generative AI, the need for robust data storage solutions has become even more critical in today’s technological landscape.”
As the scale of large AI model clusters has expanded to include tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands, of GPUs, the frequency of cluster faults and training interruptions has increased. The lengthy process of repeatedly writing checkpoint data and resuming training leads to extended idle time for computing cards, causing cluster utilization to drop below 50%. Additionally, by 2026, the power consumption of global data centers is expected to be 2.3 times that of 2022, equivalent to the annual power consumption of Japan. More than half of this power will be consumed by AI.
Alvarez said he believes that AI will disrupt traditional data storage, by not only focusing on performance, reliability, and data paradigm, but also on scalability, sustainability, and data fabric. He emphasized Huawei’s commitment to lead in innovation across six (6) key dimensions, namely:
- Ultra-performance: With a tenfold increase in storage performance and support for petabyte-scale bandwidth, Huawei’s storage solutions turbocharge the AI process.
- Data resilience: Innovative architecture ensures unparalleled reliability, with built-in ransomware detection enhancing security.
- New data paradigm: Multi-dimensional tensor data retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology eliminate AI model inaccuracies.
- Scalability: Huawei’s storage clusters can scale to exabyte capacity levels, accommodating the exponential growth of data.
- Sustainability: Groundbreaking innovations in energy efficiency and storage density reduce environmental impact.
- Data fabric: Enhanced metadata management enables seamless global data mobility and manageability.
Alvarez also mentioned that these impressive innovations paved the way for the release of the high-performance OceanStor A800, a powerful addition to Huawei’s OceanStor series storage models.
Designed specifically for AI, the OceanStor A800 can increase AI cluster utilization by 30%. Alvarez highlighted the A800 tenfold performance increase over traditional storage systems and robust ransomware detection capabilities, ensuring data integrity and security.
Innovations in storage media are promoting sustainable development. Huawei’s newly released high-capacity SSDs offer 10 times more capacity within the same disk size, significantly reducing data center energy consumption. With a capacity of 128 TB per disk, these new SSDs consume 88% less storage space and 92% less energy than their competitors’ SSDs for storing one petabyte of data.
Shifting gears from hardware, Alvarez said, “To be AI-ready, enterprises must first get data-ready.” The Omni-Dataverse global file system, integrated within the DME, makes enterprise data assets visible, manageable, and mobile across regions, establishing a solid AI data lake storage foundation for enterprises.
Alvarez concluded by reaffirming Huawei’s commitment to customer-centric innovation, aiming to redefine data storage for the AI era.
“By understanding and addressing the evolving needs of modern businesses, Huawei strives to build AI-ready data infrastructure that unlocks transformative value for its customers,” he added.