H13-611 learning - HCNA-Storage-BSSN(Building the Structure of Storage Network) Updated: 2023

Modern businesses are under pressure to be agile, adaptive and innovative. The IT department feels the brunt of it, as the organisations goes through digital transformation projects, while still needing to keep the lights on.

Data is the core of intelligent management; the intelligent management, scheduling, mining, and analysis of data allows applications to deliver personalised experience and companies implement precision control over the design, production and logistics process to reduce management costs. Data is defining new business models and creating new commercial opportunities.

Additionally, businesses need to store a lot of data, and think nothing of having to store data into multiple petabytes. The digital and intelligent transformation demands high-performance infrastructures, and there's the added challenge of an expanding and demanding regulatory environment which places demands on the organisation's storage environment.

How can modern businesses keep up with the storage demands of the volumes of data, while meeting regulatory compliance? A different way of working, in both the data centre and the wider business transformation, can be found in All Flash Arrays (AFA) storage.

Born with high performance, all-flash storage is one of the new engines being touted for mission-critical services. Competition and progress in all-flash storage has created a level of maturity, reliability, and cost-effectiveness that exceeds hybrid disk arrays in all characteristics except raw capacity, providing data centres with higher agility and service capability.

Huawei is one of the vendors in the market, that has vertically integrated its capabilities in chips, networks, and management. Highlighting its leadership position, Huawei has released the OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage series, which adopts an intelligent Solid State Drives (SSDs) controller chip, intelligent multi-protocol processing chip, and intelligent BMC management chip to build an end-to-end service acceleration platform, delivering triple performance and maximizing resource utilisation.

Data is stored on SSDs, that's why performance and stability of these drives are critical. The control unit is responsible for data read/write. The Flash Translation Layer (FTL) is used to store the mapping between the user LBA and the physical page in the SSD. To achieve the ultimate in storage speed, Huawei leverages an innovative SSD controller chip to accelerate data read and write. The FTL algorithm is moved from the control software layer to the SSD controller chip, so that all FTL reads and writes are performed by the chip, significantly reducing the number of software interactions and hence the I/O response latency.

For example; a computer using Windows 95 needs to load a long string of codes after being powered on, which takes two to three minutes. After switching to Windows 2010, the computer has a stronger CPU to load the codes. You can enter the "Start Up" interface instantaneously. According to tests by Huawei's performance and interoperability lab, the read latency of Huawei SSDs is as low as 80 μs in low-load scenarios, which is better than the other vendors; the performance is two times higher than that of competitors.

To achieve end-to-end acceleration, Huawei developed the FlashLink technology by combining  SSDs and storage controller , NVMe architecture, and a storage operating system designed for flash from the ground up. Huawei's Dorado storage can deliver three times higher performance after enabling of value-added features such as deduplication, compression, and snapshot, while maintaining 0.5 ms latency, eliminating performance shortage issues in peak hours.

Whether for new applications such as artificial intelligence, Big Data, autonomous driving, and blockchain, or traditional healthcare, manufacturing, and finance industries, innovative chip technologies have become the main driving force of enterprises.

The intelligent SSD, within the OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage series, has a controller chip purpose-built for the flash media, exploring full potential of flash to Boost user experience. The multi-protocol intelligent processing chip simplifies networking, reduces management costs, and offloads network protocols to accelerate data read/write.

OceanStor Dorado's intelligent BMC management chip accelerates fault locating, implements failover in seconds, and excels in energy saving, helping users leasing IT devices to reduce costs and explore new business opportunities.

Find out how Huawei is continually improving its storage products.

Data has become an important factor in keeping an organization agile and competitive. However, traditional ways of storing data, to meet both technical and compliance needs, are failing. Two examples of how organizations have been able to modernise their storage environment demonstrate just how much of a competitive advantage investment in this area can offer.

The core of intelligent management; the scheduling, mining, and analysis of data, help applications deliver personalised experience and companies implement precision control over the design, production and logistics process to reduce management costs.

Companies from a variety of industries, across Europe and Asia, choose to go with the Huawei OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage Series, to help them make storage the driving force for their enterprise.

In 2017, the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership (LowCVP) announced the 2017 Low Carbon Champions Awards. BYD UK — the London branch of BYD Auto — won the "Low Carbon Heavy Duty Vehicle of the Year Award" and jointly won the "Grand Prix" — the top award — with Transport for London (TfL) and Go-Ahead London for their partnership in launching London's first two all-electric bus routes. This award specifically noted BYDs contribution in delivering the vehicles, operational capacity, and infrastructure for the London project.

Founded in 1995, BYD in IT-related and automobile business for traditional fuel-powered vehicles and new energy vehicles. BYD Auto experienced a period of rapid business development and proliferation of operational processes. This generated a large amount of concurrent data flows from product sales, spare parts inventory, and after-sales services.

To provide an idea of the exactly how much additional data was being generated, the volume of data most manufacturing enterprises' online transaction management systems doubles every two years, and concurrent requests to the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system grow exponentially, leading to high I/O frequencies and long user wait times.

This increased in data must be analyzed by a BI system, combined with the shorter timeframe in which data must be processed and reports generated, imposing stringent requirements on data loading and processing speed, as well as system stability. The BI system is a must-have tool for enterprises' manufacturing planning, sales analysis, market trend forecasts, and other important business decision-making.

BYD Auto's ERP system couldn't handle the required 185,000 Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and 60,000+ concurrent services during peak hours. The system once took over an hour to query the monthly SAP ERP financial statements. Access performance was so poor, the ERP system could not be used for service development. In one extreme case, a system breakdown even jeopardised production line operation.

Based on these requirements and the analysis results of BYD's live network, Huawei created an OceanStor Dorado all-flash acceleration solution for the auto company. In this solution, HDD-based storage was replaced by all-flash storage to expedite read and write I/O and make the ERP and Business Warehouse (BW) systems more efficient. No changes were made to the live network architecture, databases, hosts, ERP software, or O&M, to avoid possible risks. To keep the system upgrade from affecting services, the Huawei data migration team provided a set of data mirroring workarounds using host volume management software.

Legacy data was also migrated to the OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage without affecting ERP services. Upon Huawei's recommendation, BYD Auto retained its development and test systems and sandbox on the legacy storage system to protect the investment.

The success of the ERP system reconstruction project led BYD Auto to choose Huawei's OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage again for its next Document Management System (DMS) and Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) system upgrade. OceanStor Dorado's superb performance and robust stability again impressed BYD.

Far away from BYD Auto is Widiba, Widiba is an online banking arm of MPS created in 2014 in Italy, with the aim of providing customers with simple, convenient, and innovative fund management services. It prides itself on delivering high value through the use of an IT platform that can be customized by users to suit their own particular needs and a network of 600 advisors, offering a wide range of telephone-based financial advice services.

In exact years, Widiba has intensified its technological innovation. It uses an interactive model similar to Google search and leverages big data engines to recommend banking services for users based on their behavior algorithms and feedback information. After several rounds of communication and repeated demonstration, Widiba chose Huawei as a partner to build a future-proof IT data management platform.

The platform is powered by Huawei's OceanStor storage systems in new data centers. The OceanStor supports converged active-active (HyperMetro) for SAN and NAS. The high-performance SSD-based all-flash SAN storage bears online transaction records and other critical business systems, and check images are kept on the large-capacity NAS storage.

During the IT enablement process, Widiba made penetrating insights into the trends of big data and the monitoring of user experience. It believes that SSDs will be the most appropriate data storage media to meet the requirement of massive storage capacity and the high performance necessary to ensure satisfactory user experience.

Therefore, Widiba has built a high-performance storage resource pool composed of SSD-based OceanStor systems to meet the performance and efficiency demands of core business systems. The pool helped increase the core service processing efficiency and shortened the average transaction and query response time. The storage system latency was reduced from 3 to 5 ms to less than 1 ms, and improved storage resource utilization, reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 30 percent.

To address the challenges of the mobile Internet era, Widiba cooperated with Huawei to design a converged active-active (HyperMetro) SAN and NAS solution. Huawei deployed one set of OceanStor systems in Widiba's Siena Production Center and another one in its Florence Data Center, in an active-active configuration. Storage resource pools at the two sites provide backup for each other, achieving 99.9999 percent data availability. The two linked sites are 100 km away from each other. One storage system of the SSD-powered active-active SAN provides 100,000 IOPS at 1 ms latency, and one storage system at the other site offers 78,000 IOPS at 2.4 ms. This design meets the storage performance requirements of IBM MQ, VMware virtualization, and PostgreSQL databases on the live network.

Migrating services is never easy and requires various types of operating systems. Application software and device models must all be moved over, which creates intense challenges in terms of compatibility.

Adding to the complexity, organisations require zero service interruption because, in the era of 24/7 operation, they can't tolerate any negative impact on customer experience. Both companies chose to go with Huawei for its OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage Series, because Huawei was able to deliver a fast and reliable system, that helped them reduce and manage costs.

Contact Huawei to find out more about the OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage Series. 

A storage building was destroyed in a raging fire Monday morning in Allegheny Township.

First responders were dispatched about 5:30 a.m. Monday for a working commercial structure fire on the 800 block of Foot of Ten Road, with multiple callers reporting that flames were visible from the building.

When firefighters arrived on scene, the building was fully involved as heavy fire and smoke billowed into the morning sky.

According to the State Police Fire Marshal’s Division, which did not clear the scene until Monday afternoon, the building was deemed a total loss, and all the contents of the building were destroyed.

Firefighters fought the blaze for several hours, and state police said heavy machinery was used to move large portions of the metal roof to help extinguish the remainder of the flames.

Officials said firefighters shuttled in thousands of gallons of water to help suppress the flames.

The building, which was a pole building and burned to the foundation, previously stored school buses and had various equipment inside at the time of the blaze, officials said.

No injuries were reported, and the cause of the fire is still under investigation, state police said.

The Allegheny Township, Duncansville and Phoenix fire departments assisted at the scene.

Mirror Staff Writer Calem Illig is at 814-946-7535.

As you prepare to leave campus, don't forget to make these housing and storage arrangements prior to your departure from Northwestern. Keep in mind that financial aid (including all forms of scholarships, grants, and loans) cannot cover the cost of your housing in Evanston while you are abroad.

Cancel on-Campus Room & Board

Leaving campus for studying abroad is considered a legitimate reason to cancel your housing contract and meal plan. You must complete a request for cancellation of room contract (a paper form, printed on blue paper), which is available in the Undergraduate Housing Office, Monday through Friday, 8:30am-5:00pm. If you stop by after business hours, you can pick up the form just outside Vina Bondurant's office, fill it out, and then put it in her inbox.

University Housing oversees assignments in Sigma Alpha Iota and Phi Mu Alpha, which are subject to the steps outlined above. For all other Greek units, contact your fraternity or sorority directly.

For further questions about University Housing, contact Mark D’Arienzo or Vina Bondurant at (847) 467-4663.

Sublet off-Campus Housing

If you will be away for a summer, a quarter, or longer and would like to sublet your apartment, try some of the following to advertise your space:

Check out this video from Northwestern Off-Campus Life offering guidance on some ways students can handle their living arrangements if they plan to be away from campus for Study Abroad.

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