When it comes to settling banking transactions, billing for usage of telecom services, and other similar mission-critical services, ensuring absolute reliability of key data is far from enough. These enterprises demand always-on businesses, placing much higher requirements on service continuity.
Statistics show that an hour-long interruption to a banking system has a serious impact on the very basic payment services. If the systems go down for one day, the bank’s reputation takes a serious hit. A downed event lasting two to three days or more would endanger the institution and create significant ripple effects on other banks and perhaps even destabilize an entire financial system.
Qualix Group reported on the losses service interruptions cause to a wide range of industries. For example, a server going down for one minute causes a $150,000 loss to an enterprise engaged in transportation; $270,000 for a bank; $350,000 for a telecom carrier; $420,000 for a manufacturing business; and $450,000 for a securities company.
The core businesses of an enterprise are essentially its lifeblood. Continuity is paramount, which means extremely high requirements are placed on performance. So then, what kinds of storage solutions are needed to carry the services of these core businesses?
Ever-escalating Demands on High Availability and Performance
From the ESG survey report it is evident that customers are most concerned about two details when it comes to their core business systems: high availability and high performance. As the platforms carrying the core data for these businesses, ever increasing demands in terms of stability, performance, scalability, and future-proof design are being placed on storage.
Numerous analysis reports on the storage requirements for global enterprises summarize the basic need of core businesses at 800-2000 IOPS per TB of resources and overall system latency stable at 5 ms or less.
Active-Active Solutions: the New Benchmark in Availability
Active-Active (AA) solutions are hands down the best choice when it comes to ensuring service continuity. Conventional A-A layouts require that the enterprise place an independent external gateway in the networking of the storage system (such as an EMC system requiring a VPLEX gateway and IBM use of SVC gateways). This requirement makes the network more complex and also increases procurement and management costs. The addition of external gateways also means extra nodes which in turn means an increase in delay, impacting overall system performance.
Mainstream storage vendors have developed A-A functions into their systems and many customers are adopting these solutions to better ensure business continuity. Core services require a complete set of data protection solutions able to guarantee high availability. These solutions often comprise data centers spread across geographic locations with the smooth evolution attributes to enable expansion in stages.
Flash Technology Yields the Needed High Performance in Storage
Flash is the primary media used to achieve high-performance storage. Vendors have gradually adopted SSD as the primary storage media and performance indicators continue to pitch upwards as further optimizations and higher configurations are applied.
Comparatively speaking, the advantage with HDD is in sequential I/O performance. Unlike SSD, HDD is not limited in the number of erase/write times. SSD shines in random I/O performance yet is limited in service life, which means targeted optimizations on the cache algorithms are necessary based on the particular usage to extend in-service times. Flash optimizations yield the needed high performance and low latency required for storage arrays.
Based on mainstream SSD/SAS disk performance and the hot data ratio on tiered storage in typical database usage cases, configure different proportion of SSDs based on the required storage performance and services.
Considering the service requirement, most use cases have a 10% to 40% SSD configuration ratio for core businesses. The actual percentage is determined by the business particulars of the organization.
Huawei Storage: the Best Choice in Stability for Core Businesses
Huawei Storage delivers the absolute best technological advantages when it comes to ensuring system availability and performance – the compelling choice in ensuring stable operation of critical services for enterprises.
In terms of availability, the Huawei Active-Active DC Solution with the HyperMetro function on-board of the industry-leading OceanStor V3 line of storage provides end-to-end AA redundancy in everything from web servers, database clusters, load balancers, transmission devices, and networking devices. The AA solution is able to ensure business continues as usual in the event of equipment failure or even a stoppage at an entire data center as services are automatically switched (yielding an RPO and RTO of zero).
Huawei tailors a local availability program after assessing the reliability requirements of the enterprise. Use of the HyperMetro feature ensures zero impact to ongoing services in the event of a fault on any one of the system arrays. As business develops and as data centers are added and layouts are changed, the same feature helps establish the active-active DC scheme able to ensure business remains online even if one of the centers goes down. Combined with the remote replication utilities in Huawei OceanStor converged storage systems and the disaster management capabilities of the BCManager software suite, dual-center redundancy is further improved to a geo-redundant layout involving three centers. Topping it all off are the ground-breaking interfaces in topology management and the host of other impressive features that deliver the viability to suit the specific use case.
? SPC-1 performance rankings
In terms of performance, Huawei OceanStor applies many of the integral benefits of SSD to the overall designs of the hardware, basic I/O processes, value-added software applications, and disk layouts. The optimizations bring the advantages of SSD into full play, boosting performance and fully integrating into the OceanStor OS. These combined advantages deliver industry-leading performance in converged flash storage systems. During SPC-1 testing, the Huawei line of storage products all earned best-in-class rankings.
With high availability build into the solution level, Huawei Storage offerings are purpose-built to keep core services up and running at all times. Always ready to meet various industry- and enterprise-specific requirements, Huawei Storage is working to become the first choice in storage with demonstrated success across the world in keeping core services online all the times.
