Carmakers Prioritize Cost Reduction with STaaS Solution

Gao Junxia

Senior Marketing Manager, Data Storage, Huawei Technologies

The era of automotive intelligence has dawned. Digital, technology-driven transformation is essential to the innovation and growth of the automotive industry. In recent years, carmakers have been focusing on higher operational efficiency and user experience, lower overall costs, better business models, and digital ecosystem development, for future-proof competitiveness. S Company has achieved significant reductions in storage procurement and operating costs with the help of Huawei Storage as a service (STaaS) solution, becoming a prime example for car companies to use STaaS solutions.

S Company is a top truck provider in Europe. Continuous service expansion has posed significant challenges to its IT infrastructure, resulting in issues such as difficulties with rapid infrastructure expansion and unbalanced resource usage. Data volume is growing faster than expected. For instance, the intelligent truck analysis system, which handles the real-time integration and application of global truck information—including driving duration, engine temperature, tire replacements, load information, and engine rotational speed—faces exponentially increasing data as truck sales rise. This growth places substantial pressure on the company's storage system.

S Company planned to build its own STaaS system by drawing on industry-leading experience in storage procurement and operations. In its storage framework procurement project, it required each supplier to propose viable solutions that would support its needs for continuous and in-depth digitalization while minimizing investment costs.

After a thorough analysis of its live network, Huawei identified several issues with the company's storage usage:

• High OPEX due to old devices consuming huge equipment space and power

• Insufficient performance to meet growing service needs

• Severe labor shortages

High-Performance and Reliable Storage Platform Is the Cornerstone for Success

Regardless of the storage solution selected, S Company's priority is choosing the right storage device—one that delivers high performance, robust reliability, and easy management. Huawei addresses these needs with its OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage products. Featuring Huawei's patented FlashLink® technology, the OceanStor Dorado products outperform the industry's next-best by 10% to 30% for the same investment. This significantly enhances S Company's Intelligent Truck Analytics System, which manages over 500,000 vehicles and processes data at rates up to 6 GB per second. OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage uses the front-end and back-end active-active architecture where all controllers and disks participate in I/O reads and writes, ensuring peak performance with no wasted components. In addition, the resilience of OceanStor Dorado has impressed S Company. The gateway-free active-active feature provides up to 99.99999% reliability and 99.99% ransomware detection capabilities, providing a solid safeguard for S Company's data. Furthermore, in S Company's tests, OceanStor Dorado's high deduplication and compression ratios have reduced energy consumption and space usage by over 40%.

STaaS Solution Maximizes Storage Resource Utilization

Huawei designed a customized STaaS solution for S Company to optimize storage resource utilization. It categorizes resources into five performance levels: Flash, UltraPerf, Perf, Standard, and Capacity. To propel more precise resource management for S Company, this solution incorporated RAID6 and RAID-TP disk protection options and added two levels for high-end and mid-range products. As a result, the resources are classified into 4 major categories and 20 sub-categories, each sub-category with defined minimum capacities to align with application needs.

Billing for each application is conducted internally on a per-TB-per-year basis, while S Company purchases resources from Huawei semi-annually based on storage requirements. The STaaS platform provides functions such as one-click resource application, metered billing, and quick provisioning. Additionally, Huawei storage's support for non-disruptive data migration addresses concerns related to application performance upgrades. The monitoring function of Huawei STaaS platform allows users to quickly obtain their resource usage and future capacity expansion plans, bolstering S Company's long-term growth.

Conclusion

As storage technology and research evolve, storage vendors like Huawei are expanding beyond conventional providers of high-speed, stable, and high-capacity storage devices. The future of storage lies in enhanced management, operational efficiency, and AI integration. Looking forward, Huawei will continue to innovate and deliver more cost-effective, efficient, resilient, and intelligent storage solutions to empower your business to grow and thrive for today and tomorrow.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, products, and technologies of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. If you need to learn more about the products and technologies of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., please visit our website at e.huawei.com or contact us.