Huawei has launched a fresh OceanStor Dorado all-flash array.
Huawei’s arrays are sold outside the USA, and the company ranks second to Dell in the worldwide all-flash array market, according to Gartner’s figures. The Dorado products feature 2-controller array designs and complement Huawei’s scale-out OceanStor Pacific products. The all-flash 9920 model was announced in September.
Huawei envisions an all-flash future for all data storage scenarios. At the Huawei Connect 2023 event in Paris, Yang Chaobin, Director of the Board and President of ICT Products & Solutions at Huawei, stated: “Ubiquitous data services require more performant, reliable, and energy-efficient data storage solutions.”
Huawei claims all-flash arrays are faster, more reliable, and consume less electrical energy than disk-based arrays.
The Dorado 2100 boasts an active-active (A-A) NAS architecture, which Huawei claims to be an industry first for SMB arrays. It provides continuous availability with a 99.9999 percent data reliability guarantee. The array can house up to 8 controllers, offers 512 GB of cache –64 GB per controller – and supports up to 400 SSDs.
Huawei emphasizes the ease of deploying the 2100 by simply scanning a QR code and highlights its support for remote mobile operation and management. The power consumption of the 2100, assisted by data reduction techniques, is 1.04 W per TB, contributing to customers’ ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) goals.
The 2100 is designed for SMB customers and is suitable for use in small to medium-sized hospitals with PACS workloads, manufacturing file-sharing, and secure email sharing. It supports the usual file access protocols.
The array is purported to have up to 30 percent lower total cost of ownership compared to peer vendors. Huawei believes it will assist SMBs in addressing data challenges such as managing a high proportion of unstructured data, overcoming slow read/write speeds from disk-based arrays, and providing multi-tenancy sharing with isolation.
NetApp has also announced an entry-level all-flash array, the AFF A150, and has established a reselling agreement for it with Fujitsu. This sets the stage for intensified competition with Huawei.
