Data Awakening: Building Leading AI-Ready Data Infrastructure

At the Huawei Innovative Data Infrastructure (IDI) Forum 2024 in Johannesburg, Diego Xiao, Vice President of Huawei Data Storage Product Line, delivered a keynote speech on "Data Awakening: Building Leading AI-Ready Data Infrastructure". Mr. Xiao introduced the "1+3+X" architecture of AI-ready data infrastructure, which stands for one data lake, three data pools, and X data services. This architecture can help enterprises fully unleash the value of their data and facilitate the intelligent upgrade of digital economy in the Southern African region.

Recent years have seen the innovation and commercialization of new information technologies and generative AI in particular. Large AI models are now widely used for mission-critical services in industries such as finance, public services, and carriers. Mr. Xiao shared the success story of a leading bank in Asia that uses Huawei's OceanStor storage solution for their AI system. Their call center's average handle time is 20% shorter; potentially fraudulent transactions are flagged within 10 milliseconds, enabling real-time fraud protection; the loan application process has been shortened from 15 minutes to just one minute and approval can be accomplished in just one second.

According to Mr. Xiao, this example shows that efficient management and use of data assets have become the greatest opportunities and challenges for enterprises in the AI age. To capitalize on these opportunities, enterprises need to build their data infrastructure using a unified data lake and three data pools that deliver exceptional performance, large capacity, and rigorous data protection, respectively. This kind of infrastructure can meet the requirements for applications in terms of performance, reliability, scalability, and resilience. Huawei's AI-ready data infrastructure can help enterprises develop a competitive edge in the AI age.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage and OceanStor A800 High-Performance Storage Establish the High-Performance Data Pool to Support Mission-critical Services and AI Applications

Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage series delivers ever-fast, ever-solid, and innovative services. Its unique gateway-free active-active SAN/NAS architecture and 99.99999% reliability ensure core service continuity 24/7. The FlashLink? disk-controller collaboration algorithm boosts file access performance fivefold. In addition, the container ecosystem is supported by plugins (CSM, CSI, CDR, and more), which enables the agile development and deployment of applications for enterprises.

The OceanStor A800 high-performance storage, a member of the Huawei OceanStor A series, is designed for AI. It delivers four times higher bandwidth and eight times higher IOPS than leading alternatives. It supports EB-scale capacity expansion as well as up to 4,096 computing cards and 512 controllers. In addition, the built-in vector index, tensor data, and RAG knowledge repositories can empower AI services in a vast range of industries.

Huawei OceanStor Pacific Scale-Out Storage Underpins the Large-Capacity Pool and Activates Mass Unstructured Data

The rise of new technologies and applications such as big data, HPC, and AI has generated massive amounts of unstructured data. Huawei OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage series supports data interworking between different protocols such as NFS, HDFS, and S3, eliminating the need for data migration. It contains up to 36 disks (up to 61.44 TB per disk) in a 2 U chassis, and offers up to 1 PB/U capacity density—the highest in the industry—while only consuming 0.5 W/TB. In addition, it supports multi-active setup across 3–12 sites with zero RPO.

Huawei OceanProtect Appliance Series Establishes the Solid Data Protection Pool to Comprehensively Safeguard Enterprises' Data Assets

Data resilience and privacy protection have become increasingly important in the AI age. Enterprises could suffer catastrophic losses from cyber-attacks that encrypt, steal, or tamper with mission-critical assets such as model files and training data. Huawei OceanProtect X series and E series appliances provide end-to-end data protection, with fast backup and recovery, large capacity, and space savings. They offer outstanding physical bandwidths for backup (155 TB/h) and recovery (172 TB/h). In addition, the patented deduplication and compression algorithm delivers an industry-leading data reduction ratio that is 65% higher than leading alternatives'. This helps customers reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) by 30%.

Omni-Dataverse Global File System Builds a Physically Distributed and Logically Unified Enterprise Data Lake

To be AI-ready, get data-ready. The Omni-Dataverse global file system, which is housed in the DME, manages the metadata on Huawei storage devices across different data centers in a unified manner. It builds a complete data lake and provides a global view of data assets. Interfaces on storage devices can be invoked to control data flow, making enterprise data assets visible, manageable, and mobile across regions.

DataMaster O&M Model Uses AI to Enhance Enterprise O&M

At this forum, Huawei released DataMaster, a large AI model for IT O&M. DataMaster analyzes O&M logs and quickly identifies irregularities and nips issues in the bud. It can understand users' intentions, translate them into SQL statements, retrieve data from the database, and flexibly generate reports as needed. It can also convert engineers' instructions into machine commands and efficiently executes O&M operations by invoking various tools or APIs. DataMaster will be integrated into the DME Data Center Management platform, which is expected to revolutionize data infrastructure management and O&M in the future.

DCS Full-Stack Data Center Solution Provides Diverse Data Services to Unleash the Value of Data Assets

Making the most of data and converting it into valuable assets is a top priority for many enterprises. Huawei's DCS full-stack data center solution uses AI technologies to deliver comprehensive infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). These include virtualization and containers, big data analytics, an AI development platform, and data backup. In this way, Huawei aims to help customers build an efficient, resilient, reliable, innovative, and future-oriented data center foundation.

Diego Xiao ended by emphasizing that Huawei remains committed to meeting the needs and addressing the challenges of customers in the era of data awakening, with the goal of building AI-ready data infrastructure and unleashing the infinite potential of digitalization and intelligence in the Southern African region.

For more details about Huawei Innovative Data Infrastructure (IDI) Forum 2024, please visit: https://bit.ly/4cp2ksX