By Chen Zhou, president Cloud & Data Center Marketing and Solution Sales, Huawei
According to the Huawei Global Industry Vision (GIV) report, the global volume of data will see an enormous increase from 32.5ZB in 2018 to 180ZB in 2025. In addition, data will become a critical production factor in the 5G era. Data production and mobility are accelerated by 5G, 4K/8K videos, IoT, V2X and other new apps. However, given that less than 2% of data is stored, and less than 10% is analyzed and utilized, it is clear that there are enormous challenges to overcome.
The first challenge is that carrier data has been stored in the silos of the production systems. Resource utilization rate is less than 30%, power consumption and space costs have reached millions of dollars, and the TCO cannot be effectively reduced. In addition, data storage requirements cannot be satisfied, capacity expansion takes a senior administrator more than six hours, and the silo architecture cannot support customers’ cloud transformation or future business development.
Second, being able to efficiently extract useful information from massive data and explore data value is another huge challenge facing carriers. During this process, data must go through the three stages of access, analysis and consumption. In the data access phase, customers are usually met with the challenge of how to connect tens of thousands of access points and convert different protocols. In the data analysis phase, customers have to solve the issue of how to integrate data from different domains for fusion analysis, and how to locate target data from among millions of tables. In the data consumption phase, customers are met with the problem of how to shorten the business development process to less than one day. These are the challenges facing the analytics domain.
After studying numerous carriers, Huawei proposed a 5G data infrastructure solution. This solution includes two parts: an intelligent storage management platform for the production domain, and an intelligent data platform for the analysis domain.
In the production domain, Huawei's intelligent storage management platform, OceanStor DJ, integrates multiple types of storage systems, such as Huawei's all-flash storage, distributed storage and storage from third-party vendors. It then consolidates the different resources and different types of storage into a unified resource pool, automatically distributes them according to different business SLAs and implements on-demand, flexible scheduling of storage resources. Based on this, it develops the ability to undertake automated planning, allocation, O&M and optimization of the full life cycle. This helps customers significantly reduce storage TCO, speed up TTM, greatly improve the ease of using storage and achieve evolution to future storage architecture.
In the analysis domain, we must overcome the challenges of difficult data access, difficult analysis and difficult consumption, open up global data connections, build a unified data platform and improve real-time data service capabilities. Huawei's intelligent data solution includes three components: data access, data processing and data enablement. Data access solves the issues with diverse data access and connects all carrier applications and data. Data processing overcomes the problems related to data fusion analysis by realizing efficient data analysis without the need for data relocation. Data enablement solves data consumption problems, enables users to enjoy the data self-acquisition-and-analysis experience and improves data usage efficiency. In addition, it makes business more agile.
Based on actual usage, Huawei's 5G data infrastructure solution can increase storage space utilization in the production domain from its current level of less than 30% up to 70%, and reduce TCO by more than 30%. The solution can also enable storage resources to be applied by the service demander and then allocated automatically. This reduces the average resource allocation time from six hours to five minutes, a decrease of more than 90%. In this way, the difficulties with storage system management are greatly reduced, and the management cost can be reduced by more than 50%, accordingly.
In the analysis domain, Huawei's 5G data Infrastructure solution has been used on a large scale in Huawei internal IT systems. This solution helped Huawei reduce each ETL task, including development and implementation, from two human to one human days, enabling data to be quickly shared among multiple analysis systems, improving cross-regional data access performance by multiple times, and reducing the time of developing data consumption applications from three days to one day.