Huawei has launched a seventh generation of all-flash OceanStor Dorado storage array products to support mission-critical AI workloads with more performance and resilience.
There are three Dorado product groups: the high-end 8000 and 18000, the mid-range 5000 and 6000, and the entry-level 3000. The v7 Dorado 18000 has three times more performance, Huawei says, than the previous generation, helped by CPU offload hardware including DPU-based SmartNICs separating data flows from control flows. An upgraded FLASHLINK intelligent collaboration algorithm between disk controllers and DPUs enables over 100 million IOPS and “extremely low, 0.03 ms latency” from an up to 32-controller system with 500 PB of capacity.
More offload engines are used for deduplication and compression, and ransomware detection.
The Dorado features 99.99999 percent single system reliability. Its SmartMatrix full-mesh architecture tolerates multi-layer faults, including those of controller enclosures, disk enclosures, and rack cabinets. It can survive the failure of up to seven out of eight controller enclosures without service interruption. Huawei says it supports ransomware protection for SAN and NAS across all zones, achieving a claimed ransomware detection rate of up to 99.99 percent. Intelligent snapshot correlation analysis and snapshot synthesis technologies ensure 100 percent data availability after recovery. Integrated IO-level continuous data protection means data can be recovered to any point in time.
Huawei says it has a unique active-active system for SAN, NAS, and S3 workloads providing load-balancing and failover.
A Data Management Engine (DME) allows for dialog-based O&M and can proactively detect exceptions through AI large language model technologies, improving O&M efficiency five-fold. It provides 30 percent higher IOPS per watt and TB per watt compared to the best unnamed competitor product, according to a Datacenter Dynamics report.
Huawei says the Dorado 18000 has a native parallel architecture for blocks, files, and objects. It can be placed in existing v6 clusters and will be compatible with future v8 clusters.
Yang Chaobin, Huawei’s president of ICT products and solutions, said at the Huawei Connect 2024 Shanghai event: “We have a lot of v6 customers that have been looking forward to seeing our next generation. Because of the American sanctions, we have a lot of limitations politically, so now we are gradually trying to recover from a lot of those difficulties, and our customers are looking for that.”
Huawei has more info on next-gen OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage here.
