Despite its setbacks, Huawei is pushing ahead with a new set of products that are part of the company's OceanStor Storage series.
Huawei has been in hot water with the United States since at least 2018, when it was accused of intellectual property theft and espionage. That concern led to a ban blocking U.S. companies from using its networking equipment on 5G wireless networks.
While the ban had nothing to do with its storage or other lines of business, Huawei is widely believed to have been hurt, both in terms of sales and reputation.
Yet the conglomerate pushes on, this time with a slew of new storage products.
The new products in Huawei's OceanStor Storage series include:
- The OceanStor Dorado Series now boasts FlashLink 2.0 technology, including enhanced NVMe Over Fabric (N0F) and intelligent disk controller collaboration. According to Huawei, FlashLink 2.0 supercharges storage systems to deliver 20 million IOPS and 0.1-ms latency.
- The OceanStor Pacific Series, designed for mass data processing scenarios, has a new design to help address mass storage issues around center of gravity and heat dissipation. According to the company, it achieves 30% resource utilization improvements and up to 62.5% footprint reduction in equipment rooms with the intelligent EC algorithm, vNode hardware architecture, multiprotocol interworking and decoupled storage-compute solution.
- FusionCube 500 is a new edge data storage processor designed for smaller environments. The product integrates compute, storage, network, security and artificial intelligence (AI) functionality in a 5U space.
- Huawei Data Management System (DMS), intended to simplify data management while making it more intelligent, uses AI along with data management engine software to streamline data exchange, provide analytics and provide full lifecycle management.
- The new OceanStor data protection appliance makes copies of data immediately after mounting so backup storage can directly take over production, according to Huawei. The company says this reduces recovery time objective (RTO) from hours to minutes. Huawei recommends using the appliance in combination with read-only and write-once Blu-ray storage discs.
While these products and capabilities aren't groundbreaking, they fall into a sweet spot that is often ignored: well-priced, proven technology with good functions and excellent performance, said Greg Schulz, senior advisory analyst at StorageIO.
"These products show that you don't have to be the first kid on the block with the latest, greatest and newest technology," he said. "Huawei's play is waiting a few years until it's on everybody's list of what to get and then rolling it out."
Schulz said Huawei also differentiates its OceanStor Storage products by focusing on performance.
"Instead of simply keeping up with features and functions and playing buzzword bingo, they put a lot of emphasis around providing really good performance at a reasonable cost," he said.
