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Within the Metropolis of Love in October, Chinese language {hardware} maker Huawei laid the seduction on thick. On the Palais des Congrès in Paris, it confirmed European enterprises its OceanStor Dorado V6, which offers file, block and object entry at a claimed diminished worth in comparison with US opponents.
An enormous promote is that its storage arrays use Arm processors. That’s a results of the US government ban that stops Huawei utilizing x86 processors from Intel and AMD. That sanction – which Huawei calls “the US ban” – noticed the provider arrange a subsidiary for its x86 server enterprise known as xFusion.
OceanStor Dorado V6 arrays are available in variants from entry-level to excessive excessive efficiency and multi-petabyte capability.
Excessive-end 8000 and 16000 fashions can scale to 32 controllers and 6,400 drives, efficiency to tens of hundreds of thousands of IOPS and almost 300PB of capability, with superior storage performance together with information deduplication, compression, cloning and replication. Entry-level 2000 and 3000 fashions can go to 16 controllers and 1,200 drives.
“Our Arm processor is the Kunpeng 920 that we’ve got developed with our companion HiSilicon,” mentioned Huawei storage merchandise director Ludovic Nicoleau, in dialog with ComputerWeekly sister publication in France, LeMagIT.
“It’s a chip designed for storage that doesn’t uselessly use power to feed circuits that don’t assist storage, like these based mostly on x86 chips in our opponents’ arrays. Our purpose is to offer the bottom attainable power footprint within the datacentre to European enterprises.”
Based on Nicoleau, the OceanStor Dorado V6 is 30% extra environment friendly in electrical energy consumption than competitor merchandise. HiSilicon Arm processors are utilized in its inside RAID controller, 32Gbps Fibre Channel and 100Gbps Ethernet playing cards, and even inside its SSDs to handle put on.
“Huawei has supplied storage arrays since 2002,” mentioned Nicoleau. “At first these have been aimed toward telcos, however then we introduced that know-how to writing working techniques. Right here, each perform, based on its significance, based on its workload, is assigned a sure variety of cores, and that has allowed us to develop optimised designs for our OS.”
The Kunpeng 920 exists in quite a few variants, every with a 7nm Arm processor. At entry degree is the mannequin 3210, with 24 cores, clock pace of two.6GHz and consuming 95W. On the high finish is the 7265, with 64 cores, 3GHz and 200W. There may be additionally the Kunpeng 916, with 32 cores, 2.4GHz and 75W.
Huawei would have used Arm processors from the beginning, however in 2016 it switched to the extra typical x86 chips for normal storage arrays for all markets. That got here within the type of the OceanStor V3, which existed for simply three years till the US measures towards the corporate in 2019. Then got here Huawei’s R&D push, which resulted within the new-generation V6 based mostly on HiSilicon Arm CPUs, and which got here to Europe in 2020.
Past the CPU, the SSDs are additionally of a proprietary design. As a substitute of two.5” as a type issue, they’re 1.7” and that enables for 36 of them in a 2U array. Its community playing cards parallelise visitors in order that 4 energetic storage arrays in numerous datacentres is feasible. That units Huawei other than opponents which use software-based synchronisation throughout three, it mentioned.
The OS – all container-based – could be up to date perform by perform with out degradation in efficiency. The potential for NAS, object and SAN performance is deliberate, and concurrently somewhat than one or the opposite, like another merchandise, however all that is but to return. Block and file collectively has been attainable for just a few months, however the addition of object is ready to reach in updates later this 12 months.
One other element beneath the hood is that the 36 SSDs in actual fact type a number of RAID clusters, with each accessible by a unique Ethernet or Infiniband card. It’s this design that enables for fast synchronisation of arrays between themselves and as much as 100km aside by way of fibre between websites, based on Huawei.
Contained in the array, these clusters discuss to one another by way of 100Gbps Ethernet – or, extra exactly, NVMe-over-ROCE – and never by way of the PCIe bus.
“We don’t supply NVMe-over-TCP as a result of it’s not performant sufficient,” mentioned Nicoleau. “Use of NVMe-over-ROCE for inside communications in addition to exterior presentation by way of SAN, to servers, is a technical alternative that enables for homogeneity of the structure.”
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