Seamless Interoperation and Fast Rollout: A Thriving Storage Ecosystem Co-built with Partners

Enterprise data centers are complex environments made up of a variety of products from different vendors. There are two reasons for this: the abundant selection of Information Technology (IT) products and vendors in the market, and the phased nature of data center construction. As a result, compatibility is a major consideration when CIOs purchase new data center equipment. It must be compatible with existing production systems, as well as with any new equipment introduced during future service expansion. For vendors, product compatibility is also crucial for surviving fierce competition.

Huawei places great importance on developing a smooth ecosystem for its storage products. With an industry-leading interoperability lab, Huawei provides end-to-end compatibility services throughout the product lifecycle. In addition, it works with mainstream IT partners to build an open, mutually beneficial ecosystem that provides reliable IT infrastructure solutions for customers.

To date, the Huawei OceanStor supports over 1 million IT application compatibility entries and has been certified by thousands of leading vendors. It covers the vast majority of compatibility scenarios encountered by enterprises. Huawei products, therefore, can be rapidly and seamlessly integrated into customers’ existing IT environments. This broad interoperability ensures the value of customers’ hardware investments. It also shortens the Time-To-Market (TTM) for new services, and enables customers to quickly respond to changes.

The OceanStor Ecosystem

• Extensibility: Smooth integration with software and hardware. Thanks to its decade-long research of storage technologies, Huawei is the industry leader in terms of equipment supported by its OceanStor storage systems, including other storage systems, network devices, servers, virtualization products, operating systems, and upper-layer applications from various vendors. In addition, Huawei has conducted extensive mutual certification with mainstream IT vendors and built its own technical certification system to provide partners with a world-class certification platform.
• Depth: Integration delivers better solutions. Huawei has worked closely with industry-leading database, virtualization, backup, and network management vendors including Oracle, SAP, VMware, Veeam, Commvault, Microsoft, and IBM. By using standard interfaces and customizing plug-ins, Huawei provides vertically consolidated, deeply integrated IT solutions for data centers. The company configures optimal product combinations focused on functionality, performance, reliability, and manageability. For example, the in-depth integration of OceanStor Dorado V3 with Commvault Simpana uses the high-performance lossless snapshot feature of the storage to back up and protect up to 1,000 Virtual Machines (VMs) within minutes, restoring data within seconds with zero service impact. This integration empowers enterprises with better data-protection capabilities than those offered by traditional backup solutions.
• Focus: Targeting the requirements of typical cases. OceanStor provides optimized solutions for customers’ high-priority IT issues. For instance, our virtual desktop solution supports VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments. Huawei provides rapid deployment and concurrent operation of thousands of desktops based on OceanStor Dorado V3 all-flash arrays. Not only does the solution offer a stable and smooth service experience, it also simplifies the Operations and Maintenance (O&M) of VDI systems and lowers Operating Expenses (OPEX). For core service systems, OceanStor Dorado V3 storage forms part of an active-active High Availability (HA) solution. OceanStor Dorado V3 storage provides data centers with complete HA capabilities covering the host, network, and storage, thereby ensuring the continuity of core applications and reliability of critical data. This applies to database, cluster, or VM software on hosts working with the HyperMetro active-active storage feature.

Continuously Expanding Interoperability

The IT industry is always on the change. To meet the requirements of ever-evolving data center ecosystems, Huawei has continued to invest heavily in its interoperability lab to ensure ecosystem interoperability.

• Sustainable growth: More than 30 dedicated engineers regularly update the compatibility information in the Huawei interoperability lab. Over 10,000 new entries are added each month.
• Rapid response: The interoperability lab responds quickly — typically within two weeks — to customer requests for interconnection capabilities not currently supported.
• One step ahead: Keeping track of software and hardware vendors’ movements at all times, Huawei is always able to support product and solution updates in step with vendors, or even ahead of time. These include VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols) and Windows Server 2019, giving Huawei an edge in maintaining competitiveness.
• Open cooperation: Huawei has conducted extensive, in-depth mutual certification with mainstream IT vendors. Through its technical certification platform, which is open to partners, Huawei nurtures an IT ecosystem centered on its storage products and based on customers’ data center service scenarios.

Since its inception, Huawei’s OceanStor ecosystem has undergone continuous expansion and rapid growth. It not only focuses on technical analysis and scenario verification of basic compatibility capabilities, but also proactively participates in the standards formulation hosted by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA). Huawei contributes to the OpenStack community, and cooperates with established and emerging IT vendors. In 2018, the company completed Veeam snapshot integration and backup certification, and conducted mutual certification with NetApp OCI NMS, SolarWinds SRM NMS, and HDS VSP storage gateway. Gartner, various industry organizations, and customers continually recognize Huawei’s ecosystem capabilities. In both 2017 and 2018, Gartner placed Huawei in the Leaders quadrant for storage ecosystem rankings.

Building an ecosystem involves continuous and painstaking efforts. Huawei is fully aware of this, and its continuous interoperability investments for OceanStor ensure seamless integration and rapid rollout in data centers. Without changing existing IT system architectures, enterprises can deploy the latest Huawei storage technology.

Moving forward, Huawei will work with IT partners in an open, cooperative, and mutually beneficial manner to ensure ongoing investments in ecosystem development. It will continue to enhance OceanStor’s competitive edge by helping customers resolve compatibility problems and protect their deep investments in storage systems.