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Enterprise products, solutions & services
Hybrid flash storage is a new category of data storage devices for enterprise environments that combines in perfect harmony the high-performance characteristics of Solid State Drives (SSDs), and the high-capacity, more economical nature of Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). This hybrid approach leverages the strengths of both storage technologies, basically allowing enterprises to optimize their storage. Given that SSDs have fast access to data and its latency is lower, they will be well adapted for managing hot data, while HDDs will be better fitted for dealing with cold data, since they can store huge data volumes at much cheaper costs per GB. The combination of data placement between these two forms of storage allows hybrid flash storage systems to offer high performance even under high demanding applications, while keeping cost efficiency.
In an enterprise context, hybrid flash storage systems offer many advantages. They will increase the general performance of the storage since mission-critical applications will be ensured to run with the speed of SSDs, reducing at the same time bottlenecks, and increasing response times. They can do this by simply bringing down the very high cost of pure flash arrays by deploying HDDs for those tasks whose performance is not so crucial.
1. Solid State Drives (SSDs): The SSDs have fast access times and are more resistant to mechanical shocks. They utilize NAND flash memory in their architecture that retains data in the absence of a power supply. Without mechanical moving parts, they also reduce the possibility of any mechanical failure. Every read/write operation, including error correction, is managed by the SSD controller so as to optimize the performance for the life of the device.
2. Hard Disk Drives (HDDs): Hard disk drives are fairly economically viable, with enormously high storage capacity, thus being extremely well-suited for large data storage. Typically, HDDs store information on rotating magnetic disks, known as platters, equipped with read/write heads that accomplish the major functions of data retrieval and recording. Because HDDs have moving parts, they tend to be a bit slower in their operations compared to SSDs, although they are still relatively inexpensive when large-scale storage is needed.
3. Data Management Software: The software required for the hybrid flash storage systems will provide intelligent data tiering to migrate data automatically between SSDs and HDDs based on access patterns. Caching mechanisms allow for an increase in the speed of reading/writing by temporarily storing data in faster storage media and making readily available data in cases of frequent requests.
4. Controllers and Interfaces: The storage controller regulates the flow of data amongst SSDs, HDDs, and the host. This controller provides for data redundancy and error correction. The most common and usable interfaces include SATA, SAS, and PCIe; among these, PCIe is generally the fastest with a lower latency, and coupled with NVMe SSDs.
5. Data Redundancy and Protection: RAID levels extend data redundancy and performance by mirroring data across disks or spreading both data and parity information across disks. Backup and replication strategies hedge these against losses in data availability and integrity; hence, they offer also better disaster recovery capabilities.
1. Cost-Effective Performance: Hybrid flash storage combines high performance with the better affordability of Hard Disk Drive storages. The system will also have the performance advantage from SSDs at lower costs compared to an all-flash storage, and therefore always find a correct balance to enable the enterprise to optimize its resources for superior storage performance at reasonable costs.
2. Scalability: These systems are designed to scale with ease. Because of this, enterprises will be able to easily scale up the storage capacity if they predict their data needs will grow in the future.
3. Intelligent Data Management: This is made possible by Hybrid Flash Storage combined together with smart data-tiering algorithms that automatically tier data between SSDs and HDDs. All the critical data that requires high performance would be readily available, while archival data could be accommodated at a much cost-saving way.
4. Higher Reliability: Since this is a hybrid system with both SSD and HDD storages, the reliability thereof is strengthen. Robustness in SSD cuts down mechanical failure, while redundancy and capacity are generally relying in the HDDs to make sure that the data is always available and intact.
1. Analyze Workloads: Understand in detail what types of workloads and data access patterns you have within your organization. The analysis here will allow you to determine the right balance of SSD and HDD storage as part of your performance and capacity requirements.
2. Leverage Data Tiering: Always leverage the data tiering feature of the hybrid flash storage to have the system automatically manage data placement. For example, hot data would reside on SSDs for fast access, while cold data was moved to HDDs for economy.
3. Performance Monitoring: Conduct regular performance monitoring of your hybrid flash storage. From there, use the performance metrics that will let you identify any sort of bottleneck or issues, and make the relevant changes to keep optimal performance continuously.
4. Implement Redundancy: To ensure that data is adequately protected, implement the mechanisms of redundancy. It could be RAID configuration, regular backups, and disaster recovery in order to ensure that should one hardware fail, data will be made available and its integrity ensured.
1. Virtualization: Hybrid flash storage works very well in virtualized environments where both performance and capacity might be a key issue. The high IOPS and low latency of SSDs are able to deal with highly demanding virtual workloads, while HDDs storage space capabilities are also a key addition.
2. Database Management: Hybrid flash storage is being increasingly adopted by enterprises to support large databases where access to transactional data has to be fast. SSDs handle high-performance needs of database operations; historical and backup data resides on HDDs.
3. Big Data Analytics: In the big data world, hybrid flash storage are very useful for enterprises, as they are able to support the often huge performance needs of such big data real-time analytics together with the capacity to deal with giant data sets, making it a perfect fit for enterprises in this field.
4. Enterprise Applications: Hybrid flash storages are flexible systems, allowing them to be adopted to perform a wide range of enterprise applications. For instance, ERP systems, CRMs, email servers, file storages, and many others.
1. Adoption of NVMe: One important trend in the recent growth of hybrid flash storage solutions has been the adoption of NVMe, or Non-Volatile Memory Express technology. This offers enhanced data transfer rates and lower latency than normal SATA SSDs, thus enabling the overall improvement of system performance.
2. Incorporation of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Many modern hybrid flash storage product designs incorporate AI and Machine Learning algorithms to achieve maximum performance and better data processing. Other value-added technologies include advanced data tiering and predictive maintenance strategies that improve efficiency for the whole storage system.
3. Cloud Integration: As most enterprises are moving into the hybrid cloud environment, even hybrid flash storage is shaping up to effectively integrate with cloud-level storage services. This really provides higher flexibility, scalability, and affordability by sharing resources between on-premise storages and cloud-based storages.
Huawei offers currently many hybrid flash solutions designed for enterprises. Some of them we can mention are the following:
1. Huawei OceanStor 18510/18810 series: feature industry-leading SmartMatrix architecture, active-active solutions for Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network-Attached Storage (NAS), flash acceleration technology, high-performance hardware platforms, and a wide range of solutions designed to improve data protection efficiency. This provides ultra-high reliability and ultra-high performance to meet data storage requirements across many different enterprise usage scenarios.
2. Huawei OceanStor V5 Series: The OceanStor V5 series provides flexible and efficient storage across a wide portfolio of enterprise applications. All the products in this series comes with SSDs and HDDs, ensuring superb performance, scalability, and reliability.
3. Huawei FusionStorage: Huawei FusionStorage is a next-generation distributed storage system adopting flash and disk. It is used for providing highly performing, linearly scalable, and fully protected data.
You can visit our OceanStor Hybrid Flash Storage to learn more regarding all our available products and solutions for enterprises in this area.
To summarize, we can say that hybrid flash storage represents a next step in data storage, where an enterprise can enjoy the best of both high-performance and cost-efficient capacity worlds. With hybrid flash storage, the advantages of SSDs and HDDs are put into one storage system, providing flexibility, scalability, and reliability, all in one.
Following some simple and practical best practices, such as analyzing your current data storage workload, performance, and other potential needs, enterprises can efficiently decide whether this is the right data storage solution for them, enjoying the many benefits it can bring to any organization.
