Huawei used its annual shindig HUAWEI CONNECT in Shanghai last week to show off its latest all-flash storage array, the OceanStor Dorado V6. And it’s a monster – with the biggest capacity that Blocks and Files has seen in a storage array.
The company has not announced availability but prior to launch it has pumped out some big numbers via a press release and a marketing page.
The Dorado V6 performs up to 20 million I/O operations per second (IOPS) – twice as much as the next-best player according to Huawei, which did not name the rival. We think it is referring to Dell EMC’s PowerMax 8000 which delivers up to 10 million IOPS. Read latency for the Huawei system is down to 0.1 ms.
Speeds and feeds
The five Dorado V6 models support Huawei’s Hi1812E NVMe SSDs and NVMe-oF access. They scale by IO port counts and the maximum number of SSDs supported, as the table below shows.
Basic maths says the maximum raw capacities are:
- 3000 – 36.8 PB
- 5000 – 49.2 PB
- 6000 – 73.73 PB
- 8000 – 98.3 PB
- 18000 – 196.61 PB
As it is 2019, the Dorado V6 of course has an AI processor – a first for a storage array, Huawei claims. The system uses this for performance tuning and management. The Dorado V6 is also packed with fault-tolerance features and Huawei claims a one-second switchover with uninterrupted links in the event of controller failure.
The array features inline deduplication and compression, thin provisioning, remote replication, continuous data protection, quality of service, cloning and snapshots and cloud backup.
Huawei has not revealed pricing yet but the V6 will probably cost $2.5m or more, judging by SPC-1 benchmark results for Dorado V3 and V5 arrays. You can apply for pricing on Huawei’s website by providing project details and a budget range into a general pricing inquiry pop-up.
