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Cloud Computing and Key Enterprise Applications Require High Performance and Efficient Management of Storage Systems

With the blossoming of the cloud computing era, more than half of x86 servers have implemented virtualization technologies. These technologies help reduce operating expenses (OPEX), improve resource utilization, and allow for more service agility. However, they also create the following challenges for storage systems:

  • Compared with a traditional physical server, a single storage system holds more services. Therefore, it must provide robust performance and employ the scale-out architecture to support these services.
  • VMs are deployed using shared storage, and a single volume may be attached to dozens, or even hundreds of VMs. Therefore, the storage system must be able to manage all applications running on each VM and coordinate resource contention of VMs, ensuring that services are processed based on different service level agreements (SLAs).
  • Since VMs have become widely used, efficient storage technologies are necessary to speed up VM deployment, expand capacity, reduce maintenance and expansion costs, and shorten the time necessary for service rollout.
  • Key enterprise applications, such as business intelligent (BI) and database applications, demand a storage system delivering high I/O performance and high throughput for improving service efficiency.

Huawei FusionStorage, a High-Performance, Efficient, and Innovative Storage System

After keeping a watchful eye on industry development trends and customers' requirements, Huawei has unveiled the FusionStorage distributed storage system that is installed on generic x86 servers. The FusionStorage system employs distributed hash-based data routing, distributed caching, global load balancing, and multi-data protection technologies to provide high-performance block storage. For that reason, FusionStorage can meet the requirements of key services in a variety of industries, including finance, telecommunications, securities, electricity, and oil. It not only ensures stability and efficiency in the operation of customer services, but also significantly improves service agility and competitiveness.

Characteristics

Advanced Distributed Architecture
FusionStorage uses a distributed architecture, including distributed management cluster, distributed hashbased routing algorithm, distributed and stateless engines, as well as distributed intelligent caching. Thus, this architecture prevents the possibility of a single point of failure (SPOF) in the system.

High Scalability
The distributed stateless engines of FusionStorage support horizontal capacity expansion, smooth and parallel storage and computing capacity expansion, and non-chimney ultra-large capacity expansion. A maximum of 4096 nodes can be supported in the FusionStorage system.

Cost-Effectiveness
FusionStorage is installed on generic x86 servers and relieves the need of dedicated storage hardware, such as fiber channel (FC) network interface cards (NICs) and host bus adapters (HBAs), thereby reducing energy consumption and use of space. In addition, equipped with solid state disks (SSDs), PCIe acceleration cards, and InfiniBand NICs, and backed by its distributed hash-based routing algorithm, I/O parallel processing, and distributed caching technologies, FusionStorage is able to provide millions of IOPS, high throughput, and low latency.

High Reliability and Parallel Data Rebuilding
FusionStorage stores a piece of data with several identical copies on different servers or disks. Therefore, failures of a single hardware device do not interrupt services. Furthermore, FusionStorage employs strong-consistency replication technology to ensure data consistency between data copies. Data is fragmented in the resource pool,
and in the case that a disk is faulty, the data fragments are reconstructed automatically from the data copies in the resource pool. It takes less than 30 minutes for FusionStorage to rebuild 1 TB of data.

Openness and Compatibility
FusionStorage is compatible with OpenStack and mainstream hypervisors, supports mainstream operating systems (OSs) and database applications, and can be installed on generic servers. These qualities work together to allow customers a great deal of freedom and flexibility when using FusionStorage.

Category

Storage

Red Hat Certifications

This product has been certified to run on the following Red Hat products and technologies:

Target Product Level
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10.0
Base: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (x86_64) 7.4-7.x for Other
Certified[1]

Additional Notes

  1. Can Huawei FusionStorage V100 be used with Red Hat Openstack Platform 10.0?