Why All-Flash NAS Is the Right Choice for Electronic Design Automation

This blog series on Network Attached Storage (NAS) looks under the hood of the latest tech in file services & storage and dives into how enterprises can skyrocket efficiency with NAS.

Chip design is one of the most incredible feats of modern engineering.

For decades, inefficient hardware or practices have hindered the development of the semiconductor industry. Until recently, with innovations from leading chip developers, an integrated design containing tens of billions of transistors on a chip no bigger than a fingernail was possible.

And the secret behind this powerful capability? Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, which offer a way to streamline processes while maximizing productivity.

As the upstream industry in the electronics field, EDA drives chip design, manufacturing, and application. Without it, any innovation in the downstream sectors is impossible.

However, EDA simulation platforms also face challenges.

• Ever-increasing complexity: Chip development still follows Moore’s Law, with integration reaching a multi-billion gate level.
• Growing workload pressures: According to a major chip design enterprise, the number of EDA simulation jobs increases by 75% every year.
• Exponential data growth: Hundreds of thousands of OPS performance is a must.

Pain points

EDA in chip design has the following workload characteristics:

• Early-stage frontend design: massive amounts of small files
• Later-stage frontend design: both large and small files
• Backend design: sequential reads/writes of large files

However, many storage deployments for EDA simulation platforms do not match the above characteristics and often fail to meet user needs:

• Servers running local disks are not built for resource scheduling or sharing between project teams, nor equipped with enterprise storage features, resulting in poor usability and a shortage of storage capacity.

• Unsuitable storage solutions often cause problems such as high storage latencies under a massive amount of KB-level small files, slow response to deletions under heavy workloads, and extra potential failure points.

• Staff may be unfamiliar with planning and using storage, causing a waste of resources, file security issues, and inefficient simulation.

How all-flash NAS can help

All-flash NAS products are purpose-built to make up for the inefficiencies common in conventional solutions. With a bunch of enterprise-class features that drive performance, reliability, and security to new levels, all-flash NAS helps EDA simulation platforms greatly streamline file storage, sharing, and management.

Today, let’s have a look at how Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash NAS helps EDA address challenges.To assist multiple chip project teams with efficient collaboration, OceanStor Dorado provides two key features — quota and QoS.

• Quota specifies the maximum storage capacity or file quantity available to each project team, ensuring that each team carries out its design work smoothly.

• QoS considers a project team as a tenant and allocates specific amounts of storage, network, and compute resources to them, preventing resource contention between teams.

To ensure quick search and access to massive amounts of files, OceanStor Dorado uses three key techniques.

1. Global distributed file system

OceanStor Dorado evenly distributes directories and files to all controllers to ensure workloads between controllers differ by under 5%, maximizing OPS and bandwidth for concurrent access to massive amounts of files.

2. Intelligent layout

Two indexing mechanisms are available to store huge volumes of small files. The metadata sequence table layout accelerates file traversal, while the metadata hash table layout speeds up file location, minimizing latency to just 0.5 ms.

3. Intelligent algorithms

The unique FlashLink algorithms implement collaboration between software and SSD chips for optimal SSD performance, achieving up to 6 million OPS. OceanStor Dorado is also equipped with reliability and security advantages that make it one of the most robust storage series in the industry.

• Its full-mesh storage architecture tolerates failure of 7 out of 8 controllers without service disruption, while the reliable RAID-TP technique tolerates failure of 3 disks in a disk enclosure without data loss.
• It can be upgraded to an active-active disaster recovery setup to achieve seven nines (99.99999%) reliability.
• It delivers full cybersecurity protection against increasingly malicious threats such as ransomware.

Summary

To accurately identify data needs and unleash data intelligence in the digital age, we must have the ability to easily and immediately adapt to changes.

With this belief in mind, Huawei provides OceanStor Dorado all-flash NAS storage to cope with various challenges in file storage, sharing, and management.

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.