In response to spikes in customer transactions, leading Brazilian power company Copel — officially, Companhia Paranaense de Energia — has placed a pair of Huawei OceanStor Dorado 8000 All-Flash Arrays (AFAs) at the heart of its new service and storage system.

As the third largest electric power company in Brazil, and the largest company in the state of Paraná, Copel is responsible for powering its entire state, operating everything from power generation and transmission systems, to transformation and distribution systems.

Yet, recent surges in customer growth rendered Copel's legacy systems unable to cope with ever-increasing transaction loads. After researching an upgrade path, the company decided that its new storage infrastructure needed to support at least 150,000 Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) — with a latency of no more than 1 ms — and have deduplication and compression enabled.

In terms of load balancing, Copel decided that logical unit numbers should not be bound to specific controllers, and that the system had to be able to support 24/7 continuity.

Clearly, traditional storage systems were not up the task, so Copel opted for two Huawei OceanStor Dorado 8000 V6 all-flash Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) arrays, deployed across two data center sites. Even with deduplication and compression enabled, the systems still deliver sub-millisecond latency. And with Huawei’s HyperMetro gateway-free active-active connectivity technology, failover is seamless, ensuring that operations remain uninterrupted.

Active-active architecture promises fully balanced loads, data volumes, and hot data. This is achieved through a combination of a load balancing algorithm, intelligent front-end distribution, global write cache, and a global storage pool. Such architecture also negates the need for a traditional gateway, further reducing costs, while ensuring zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) during disaster recovery.

Now, Copel has all the tools it needs to cope with growing transaction loads. Moreover, Huawei has helped prepare the company with a system built to last, one that will serve as a foundation for further growth in the future.

Feeling weighed down by the pressure of surging data? Find out what OceanStor Dorado AFAs could do for your enterprise.