Striding Towards the Intelligent World — Data Storage White Paper

Digitalization is just the beginning if we look at the global progress. It is expected that over the next decade, enterprises of all sizes will experience complications during their digital transformation (DX) journey. IT data applications will become more diversified, and increasing volumes of application data will be processed by the production systems, meaning the need for reliable, performant, cost-effective data storage is more important than ever.

For this reason, the Striding Towards the Intelligent World — Data Storage white paper presents Huawei's outlook for the storage evolution in enterprise data centers. Covering 9 topics, it provides enterprise customers with recommendations on data infrastructure development to jointly foster the data storage industry.

Unstructured Data

Unstructured data accounts for more than 80% of new enterprise data and is increasingly important to production and decision-making. It is necessary for enterprise IT teams to transform their structured data-centric capabilities to design, planning, and management of mass unstructured data.

Diverse Data Applications

Diverse data applications such as distributed databases, big data analytics, and AI are booming. Enterprises are encouraged to use the decoupled storage-compute architecture to serve emerging data applications for higher reliability. In addition, acceleration engines can be built for diverse data applications to implement near-data processing that delivers higher efficiency.

All-Scenario Inclusive All-Flash

All-flash storage accounts for more than 50% of the primary storage market, and the era of inclusive flash storage is coming. Huawei recommends that enterprises seize storage replacement and deployment opportunities to accelerate the adoption of all-flash storage.

Ransomware Protection

Ransomware attacks are becoming the most significant threat to enterprises. Their storage teams are advised to establish a more comprehensive data protection system and build an all-round ransomware protection storage solution to strengthen the last line of defense for data protection.

Digital Resilience

As data is becoming the core asset for enterprises, digital resilience is a major metric for any enterprise resilience framework. Enterprises should strengthen data protection to ensure zero data leakage, tampering, and loss, always-on services, and always compliant access, thus enhancing digital resilience.

AI-Powered Storage

From management to products, AI powers autonomous-driving storage throughout the data lifecycle. It is recommended that enterprises proactively develop evaluation criteria for storage AI management software, and storage management teams upgrade tech stacks for storage AI.

Multi-Cloud Architecture

As multicloud becomes the new normal, the recommended practice is to migrate innovative services that have uncertainties and emerging services like OA to public clouds, while retaining core services in their on-premises data centers. In multi-cloud construction, enterprises are advised to use the IT architecture that centrally stores and shares data and deploys applications in multiple clouds, and plan a unified data management platform across clouds to maximize data sharing.

Storage Business Models

A flexible storage business model helps handle explosive data volumes and economic uncertainties. Huawei recommends that enterprises plan how to obtain IT resources and select the most appropriate business model according to business requirements and future strategies.

Energy Saving

Green data storage is a must for data centers to reach net-zero carbon emissions. Enterprises can deploy storage products with high-density designs, system convergence, and efficient data reduction to further reduce data center energy consumption.

For more details, see the Striding Towards the Intelligent World — Data Storage white paper