New apps, New data, and New Resilience: Huawei proposes ways of evolving storage in the yottabyte era

The Innovative Data Infrastructure Forum (IDI Forum) 2023, revolving around the theme of “New Apps ∙ New Data ∙ New Resilience,” took place on May 23 in Munich, Germany. The Forum brings together global industry experts and partners. They explore the future of digital infrastructure towards the yottabyte era (a yottabyte is equal to a quadrillion gigabytes).

At the forum, Huawei delved into a host of different topics. These included embracing the emerging application ecosystem, efficiently handling masses of unstructured data, and comprehensively improving data resilience. These efforts aim to unlock the value of data towards the evolution of the data storage industry.

Huawei believes data storage faces major changes and great opportunities as digital transformation deepens:

• Firstly, 56% of enterprises deploy AI applications. Meanwhile, 96% of enterprises plan to build cloud-native applications to deal with ever-changing data applications.
• The data is growing exponentially. 80% of new data is unstructured data with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 38%.
• Finally, data resilience faces severe challenges. Ransomware is constantly evolving, and the number of ransomware attacks is growing at an annual rate of 98%. Worryingly, over 14% of enterprises are unable to restore their data after a ransomware attack.

Emerging big data and AI applications pose higher requirements on the parallel processing of diversified data. The collaboration model between data storage and data applications is being reconstructed. This is to embrace new data paradigms. Cloud-native applications are becoming more prevalent in enterprise data centers. To tackle these challenges, reliable and high-performance container storage is a necessity.

As unstructured data used for production and decision-making systems becomes increasingly hot due to real-time access, the read/write bandwidth and I/O access efficiency of scale-out storage need to be significantly improved. To meet the need for cost-effective storage of mass unstructured data, innovations in...Data resilience threats are evolving from natural disasters and physical damage to human-factor disasters such as ransomware. Hence, a shift from reactive response to proactive defense is critical to ensure higher data resilience. The surge in zero-day vulnerabilities and huge losses caused by unrecoverable data reveal the inadequacy of the current enterprise data resilience system. Such a system consists of networks, applications, and hosts. It is no longer adequate for meeting the latest data resilience requirements of enterprises. Data storage is becoming the last line of defense for data resilience. More resilience features are being integrated into data storage products, including ransomware detection, data encryption, secure snapshots, and data recovery in Air Gap.Dr. Zhou remarked in his speech that Huawei Data Storage provides an extensive range of products and solutions. These are to meet customers’ and partners’ evolving requirements. OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage and OceanStor Pacific Scale-Out Storage were all recognized as a 2023 Customers’ Choice in Gartner Peer Insights.To see the bigger picture of the data storage industry, the total shipment of the world’s top five External Controller-Based (ECB) storage vendors in 2022 was 3x higher than that in 2012. However, this figure falls far short of what is required to meet global demands in the yottabyte era.Huawei predicts that this number will grow tenfold by 2032, exceeding 100 exabytes. Data storage solutions must not only prioritize capacity and performance. They must also foster novel data paradigms, intelligent data fabric, and intrinsic data resilience. These actions will unlock the full potential of mass data and empower rapid development of the data storage industry.