CSUC: Bits and Watts in Balance for a Green Future

Since Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya (CSUC) made the decision to adopt Huawei OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage, efforts to achieve supreme capacity density and energy saving have allowed CSUC to have its cake and eat it. Bits and watts, or in other words, high storage capacity and low power consumption, are no longer conflicting pursuits, leading to the emergence of a new choice for data infrastructure development.

When you think of Catalonia, does your mind conjure up thoughts of the gorgeous sunshine of Barcelona, the bold movements of flamenco, or the green pitches of La Masia? Catalonia is not only the birthplace of legends, but where Spanish industry, economy, and tourism converge.

In a land kissed by warm Mediterranean breezes, works of architecture by Antoni Gaudí demonstrate a seamless fusion of innovation and tradition, just like when technologies meet education.

The Achilles' Heel of CSUC

Every legend has an Achilles' heel. As an education MSP co-founded by the government and universities of Catalonia, CSUC faces diverse challenges.

MSP, which stands for managed service providers, is a popular type of organization that has arisen through the trend of digital development. An MSP is a third-party company that remotely manages a customer's information technology (IT) infrastructure and delivers services, such as network, application, infrastructure, and security, via ongoing support and active administration. These actions help customers reduce O&M costs and enhance flexibility and competitiveness.

CSUC, a top MSP, was co-founded by the Catalan government, seven public universities, and three private universities. CSUC provides high-performance computing, research data sharing, and management, among other services, for universities, research institutes, museums, and libraries across Catalonia, boosting their operating efficiency. In addition, CSUC connects 16 supercomputers to support the platform development of molecular dynamics and pharmacology research.

However, an MSP is not a cure-all. The strong capabilities possessed by such companies inevitably lead to problems such as complex interfaces and pressure being put on infrastructure operations. Faced with such challenges, it is critical for CSUC to innovate to maintain a competitive edge.

The biggest pain point for CSUC is device power consumption.High power consumption is a weakness inherent in the MSP mode. Europe has long been gripped by an energy crisis, and energy costs have surged 5-fold in just 3 years. The operational expenditure (OPEX) of ICT enterprises in Europe is currently estimated to increase by 50%.

With data volumes exploding, energy efficiency is now the sword of Damocles hanging over CSUC, and storage device renewal has become a pressing concern.

High power consumption with low efficiency is doubly damaging. Over 90% of the space of CSUC's old storage devices had been consumed, and latency and bandwidth performance both encountered bottlenecks, significantly hindering the research of numerous universities and institutions.

In addition, since research data typically involves NFS and S3 protocols during reading, writing, and result sharing, data must be copied multiple times, further decreasing efficiency.

Icebreaker and Golden Sail for the Green Era

With even more severe challenges ahead, CSUC planned to use all its remaining four racks and chose storage solutions that could give these four racks higher storage capacity at lower energy consumption.

Historically, there was hardly any balance between capacity and energy consumption. As the Chinese saying goes, "You cannot have both fish and a bear's paw at the same time." The story of Don Quixote thrusting at the windmill conveys a similar message. So how can CSUC break the deadlock?

A proper criterion is an "icebreaker" for CSUC.

A number of energy-efficiency standards for storage have been prevalent in the industry over the years. Performance supported per watt (in IOPS/W or GBps/W), if used to evaluate storage, is unreliable in situations where IOPS fluctuates alongside bandwidth under different service workloads, such as sequential reads of large files and random writes or modifications of small files. This makes the actual performance value difficult to measure, making the indicator unfeasible.

Another unit that can be measured through U/W is the hardware height supported by each watt. However, this also lacks validity, with hardware configurations becoming increasingly complex. In some extreme cases, the measured value may indicate low overall power consumption, while storage system capacity and performance fall short. Therefore, there is no solution here either.

After careful consideration and comparison, the CSUC decided to use TB/W as the unit, where the energy consumption directly correlates with storage capacity. This delivers both validity and feasibility, and the indicator has proven to be a game-changer for balancing mass data storage and low energy consumption.

As soon as the sea lane opens, a golden sail emerges.

Once the measurement criterion was specified, Huawei OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage distinguished itself as the ideal choice for CSUC. OceanStor Pacific serves as a resource pool for hot data and offers the industry's highest capacity density of 384 TB/U in terms of all-flash storage. Furthermore, it offers a power consumption density of 1 TB/W, which would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. In addition, the 5 U, 120-disk, ultra-high-density model helps CSUC store an astonishing 40 PB of data in just four racks.

Xavier Peralta Ramos, Data Infrastructure Service Manager of CSUC in Spain, noted that Huawei's products and solutions met all their requirements. After the project, storage capacity increased by 24 times, and power consumption per TB was slashed by 16 times. Xavier added that CSUC planned to leverage sufficient data to promote deep learning and train AI models, thus helping the education industry accelerate towards intelligence.

Green data centers in the Iberian Peninsula are lighting the way for scientific research and education digitalization. The windmill that once stood as an obstacle has been overcome by the scientific and technological power of data.

Bits and Watts: No Longer a Trade-off

Green data centers should not be limited to construction in equipment rooms or schools in Europe. Instead, they should represent the future direction of the ICT industry.

According to a report by an international research platform MarketsandMarkets, the global market scale of green data centers will increase from US$49.2 billion in 2020, to US$140.3 billion by 2026, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.1%.

Enterprise-class storage consumes a huge amount of energy in data centers, and the carbon emissions from such storage account for about 30% of a data center's total. Therefore, it is imperative to upgrade the storage foundation. In the dual-carbon era, scale-out storage is the optimal foundation for mass data. Huawei OceanStor Pacific is already innovating in all-flash storage, and gradually stepping into the spotlight as the industry pursues green data centers.

Huawei OceanStor Pacific's power consumption density of 1 TB/W is its standout feature, and is strongly supported by a trinity of capabilities. First, a combination of high-density dedicated hardware design and high-capacity SSDs come together to replace the previous combination of general-purpose servers and distributed software. This realizes three times higher capacity density and halved power consumption per unit space. Second is the scenario-based data compression capability. Huawei has developed the industry's only 2:1 data compression technology, enabling computing power to be offloaded to a dedicated compression card. Third, multi-protocol interworking and high-ratio EC capabilities facilitate all-in-one devices and eliminate the need for cross-system data migration and data copying. This improves space utilization and meets reliability requirements.

The Huawei OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage solution perfectly balances bits and watts. This collaboration not only represents the first chapter in the story of green data centers, but a significant milestone for the future digital economy.