Huawei Partners with Nvidia, Intros New Flash Storage: OceanStor

September 9, 2013 | By Kevin Parrish | Tom's IT Pro

Last week during Huawei Cloud Congress in Shanghai, the company made a number of announcements including a partnership with Nvidia, an updated FusionSphere cloud computing platform, and its new flash-based enterprise-focused storage system, the OceanStor 18800F.

Huawei's announcement regarding Nvidia revealed that it will apply the GPU giant's GRID technology to its own FusionCloud platform. This will allow Huawei's desktop cloud users to have quality 3D graphics comparable to graphics-focused workstations. More specifically, Huawei's E9000 blade servers now support GRID K1 and K2 graphics cards, and Huawei's FusionCloud platform now supports GRID VGX software.

"This solution helps Huawei provide high-quality and fast desktop cloud services to enterprise users," the company said. "The GPU virtualization technology can also increase the density of virtualized graphics cards to realize high-performance and high-density GPU acceleration. As a result, desktop cloud users can employ high-speed graphics processing services anywhere anytime."

For the uninitiated, Nvidia's GRID solution includes two K1 and K2 graphics cards, and the VGZ software that functions as a virtualized GPU with remote connection and management functions. The two cards are designed for harsh environments, allowing a single GPU to be shared by many users. These are combined with low-latency remote display technology that eliminates latency caused by remote access to a data center.

As for Huawei's FusionSphere cloud operating system, the company introduced v3.0, offering significantly better performance than the previous version. This operating system is a major component of Huawei's FusionCloud converged cloud computing solution that can seamlessly run computing storage and networking resources from different vendors in the same data center.

"It provides superior resource virtualization and management functions, abundant cloud service components and tools, and open application programming interfaces (APIs)," the company said. "These features enables management of hardware infrastructure from different vendors, upper-layer hypervisors, and a variety of management software on the same platform, while providing full-scale service backup and recovery capabilities."

In addition to the updated FusionSphere, Huawei introduced what it claimed as the industry’s first enterprise storage system that features an all-flash design, with the highest performance and lowest latency: the OceanStor 18800F. The company said it's also the industry's first enterprise storage system that eliminates disk failure. That's because the new OceanStor combines solid-state storage and enterprise storage by employing Smart Matrix Architecture and RAID2.0+ for flash technology.

"The all-flash design enables the OceanStor 18800F to achieve million-level IOPS (based on the standard testing model) and microsecond-level latency, making it the fastest and the only enterprise storage system in the industry that offers microsecond-level response. Meanwhile, the OceanStor 18800F is the industry's first enterprise storage system that eliminates disk failure."

Huawei also revealed a next-generation firewall, a new platform called FusionInsight for Big Data and much more during the event.