A Green and Low-Carbon Strategy in Data Infrastructure Promotes Sustainable Development

Combating climate change is becoming increasingly urgent and a global consensus, regarding the digital economy and green development, is now taking shape. According to Huawei's Global Industry Vision (GIV) report, by 2030, 1 YB of data will be generated globally each year, representing a 23-fold increase compared to 2020. Storing data consumes enormous amounts of energy, of course, highlighting the critical importance of green and sustainable development.

Huawei's green strategy for data storage — coined as 3 + 1 — reduces energy consumption per TB through a high-density design, system convergence, and data reduction. It also supports recycling and sustainability through full-lifecycle carbon footprint management.

High-Density Design

Huawei uses high-density components and systems to increase both hardware density and the efficiency of heat dissipation. Solid-State Drives (SSDs) are a far more energy-efficient alternative to traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), consuming 70% less power and requiring 50% less physical space for like-for-like capacity. Huawei's use of half-palm Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) SSDs enables its storage systems to support 36 SSDs in a 2U disk enclosure, delivering much higher hardware density than similar products and 25% higher heat dissipation efficiency than a traditional disk enclosure.

System Convergence

Huawei ensures higher resource utilization by supporting multi-protocol interworking and eliminating silos. One storage system supports block, file, object, and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) protocols for diversified requirements. In addition, the converged resource pool enables on-demand data mobility, improving resource utilization.

Data Reduction

Huawei uses deduplication and compression algorithms as well as a high-ratio elastic Erasure Coding (EC) algorithm to improve the use of space and reduce data duplication. Currently, the deduplication and compression algorithms help Huawei storage systems deliver a data reduction ratio of up to 72:1, 20% higher than the industry benchmark. In addition, Huawei's proprietary 22 + 2 elastic EC algorithm achieves a maximum resource utilization rate of 91%, 1.75 times higher than the traditional three times replication mechanism.

Huawei remains committed to exploring and promoting the circular economy, introducing the concept of a reduced carbon footprint into its product lifecycles. During product development, Huawei uses renewable materials and has also reduced the amount of packaging while introducing the use of greener packaging materials . In terms of product operations, Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) enables on-demand data storage and use. Huawei also mitigates its environmental impact by maximizing product recycling through a continually improving global recycling system.

Out in the real world, the largest bank in Latin America — Itaú Unibanco — has already embarked on its green and low-carbon digital journey, for example, choosing Huawei OceanStor All-Flash Arrays (AFAs), which provide higher performance than the bank's legacy infrastructure, allied to 45% lower power consumption in its data center. Learn more here: https://e.huawei.com/en/case-studies/industries/finance/2021/itau-connect-people-with-finance

Looking to the future, green development will be Huawei's long-term focus. Huawei will therefore continue to help data centers go green through ongoing technological innovation, enabling digital transformation in all industries.