Huawei Unveils Storage Solutions for Education and Healthcare to Help SMEs Accelerate Their Digital and Intelligent Transformations

[Dubai, UAE, October 16, 2024] During GITEX GLOBAL 2024, Huawei unveiled its storage solutions for SMEs in the education and healthcare sectors in the Middle East and Central Asia regions at the "OceanClub Open Day" event. These solutions are designed to help these institutions cope with data challenges in the AI era and facilitate their digital and intelligent transformations.

In the education field, the rapid growth in the number of scientific research applications and the volume of scientific research data also poses significant challenges to data storage. The convergence of high-performance computing (HPC), AI, and big data technologies increases the complexity of the data models used for scientific research and places more stringent requirements on the bandwidth and input/output operations per second (IOPS) of storage systems. However, conventional siloed information systems restrict data sharing across disciplines and campuses and hinder scientific research collaboration and innovation.

To tackle these challenges, Huawei launched the High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) Solution for Higher Education & Research to meet the data service requirements for all education and scientific research scenarios. It offers unified data management in one storage pool, and supports on-demand expansion to up to 4,096 nodes, with each node providing up to 90 GB/s bandwidth and 2.4 million IOPS. The solution's flexible configuration specifications enable it to easily meet the requirements for a diverse range of services, such as HPC, AI, big data analytics, virtual resource pools, and mass data backup and archiving, thereby making storage and the use of scientific research data more efficient.

Meanwhile, many small- and medium-sized hospitals' data centers cannot keep up with rapid service development. The healthcare industry is struggling with storage for the following reasons: sharp increase in the volume of medical imaging data, system stability, complex system architecture, and high costs. The development of imaging technologies has led to a sharp increase in the volume of medical imaging data that is generated as part of each patient consultation, and this means that retrieving specific image takes longer. The hospital service system needs to be highly stable, maintenance needs to be possible without interrupting services, and critical data needs to be recovered within minutes or even seconds in the event of a system failure. Furthermore, technical and financial limitations mean that most vendors cannot support active-active services for both SAN and NAS, so hospitals have to purchase multiple sets of devices, and this increases system architecture complexity and maintenance costs.

To address these challenges, Huawei launched the All-Flash Storage Solution for Hospital Information System (HIS) & Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) in Small- and Medium-sized Hospitals. Based on Huawei OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage series, this solution delivers ten times higher IOPS than conventional hybrid flash solutions and cuts image retrieval time from 30 seconds to just 3 seconds. In terms of service stability, Huawei's gateway-free active-active solution for both SAN and NAS simplifies the storage architecture, reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 30%, and shortens the failover time from at least 60 seconds to 5–15 seconds.

In addition, the solution comes equipped with the OceanProtect Backup Storage that is compatible with mainstream backup software and support out-of-the-box availability, meeting the data backup requirements of small- and medium-sized hospitals over the next five years and enabling rapid service restoration in the event of ransomware attacks.

Mark Zou, Huawei's Director of ME&CA Enterprise IT Marketing & Solution Sales, noted that Huawei will continue to develop differentiated storage solutions for customers of different sizes and in different industries, and offer more professional and efficient data infrastructure products and services to facilitate enterprises' digital and intelligent transformations in a wide range of industries.