Going All-Flash: A Must for Carriers?

To succeed in the #digitalworld, many in the #telecommunications industry are developing their own #digitaltransformation strategy, while helping other industries and sectors create a #roadmap for their digital journeys.

Despite the clear benefits of digital tech like #5G and #cloudcomputing, carriers are facing new challenges:

• The huge pressure of workloads requires better data capabilities for the internal #BSS and #OSS systems.
• External systems need to serve data-intensive applications like IoV, gaming, entertainment, and #AR / #VR.

To handle the exponential #datagrowth and new innovative scenarios, carrier #datacenters must deliver high-concurrency, low-latency data transmission with 24/7 continuity. However, this presents huge challenges to conventional IT #infrastructure.

International Data Corporation (#IDC) reported that in many cases, devices in carriers’ data centers are outdated — even out of warranty — with performance issues and high failure rates. Moreover, traditional storage devices feature a large footprint, high power consumption, and expensive O&M, causing #OPEX to soar.

Therefore, modern infrastructure is needed to handle both existing difficulties and future storage. And carriers are looking to new, powerful all-flash data centers to upgrade their devices and modernize the data foundation to optimize #ROI.

Pain points of traditional architectures

In the information era, customer satisfaction is everything. As a major driving force behind digital transformation, improved customer loyalty is a #KPI for emerging value-added services in any industry. However, traditional architectures have become a bottleneck for user experience (UX).

The following lists the typical pain points faced by many carriers with, for example, the distributed database scenario:

Siloed deployment, meaning complex IT infrastructure

• Storage-compute coupling, causing inefficient use of IT resources
• Difficult to adapt to service changes during peak hours
• Unable to flexibly expand storage resources, incurring high management costs

Finding solutions in the all-flash data center

To avoid the reliability weaknesses often found in coupled storage-compute solutions, #allflash data centers run on a decoupled storage-compute architecture, offering the elastic expansion of compute and storage resources for efficient and #economical use.

In line with all-flash evolution, all-flash data centers also deliver these benefits:

• Persistent memory accelerates data access while providing enterprise-class storage management functions.
• The NVMe transmission standard directly connects SSDs to CPUs over PCIe channels, significantly reducing latency.
• NVMe interfaces not only improve data security but simplify management of all-flash data centers.
• All-flash storage yields a much smaller physical footprint, higher disk density, and lower power consumption over HDD models.

These advantages serve as compelling arguments for how all-flash technology combined with a new architecture can help customers slash costs and increase efficiency, while achieving the ultimate goal of being green.

All-flash success case: A major carrier ensures sustainable core services and bolsters UX

One major carrier’s IT systems were plagued with #performance and #stability issues due to increasing workloads and irregular #peakhours.

To ensure service efficiency and quality, the company developed #TeleDB, a database based on #MySQL. It also reconstructed its system architecture to improve database reliability and automate O&M.

Specifically, the company needed to address three main challenges:

1. High reliability to ensure smooth running of core services.
2. Better agility to facilitate service development.
3. Cost-effectiveness to lower the TCO.

To meet these challenges, the carrier adopted an all-flash data center, running on a decoupled storage-compute architecture to ensure the reliable and stable running of core services. Other benefits for the carrier include:

• More efficient use of IT resources.
• Less energy consumption and footprint.
• RTO shortened from hours to minutes.

On top of that, the all-flash data center creates a new foundation for new service development in the era of mobile Internet thanks to its #futureready #architecture.

Building a faster, greener, and stronger data foundation with all-flash

Many forward-thinking organizations have already made the move to all-flash data centers. With an excellent price-performance ratio, moving to an all-flash model also proves to be the right choice for carriers to build their next-gen infrastructure.

With clear advantages in agility, availability, reliability, efficiency, and cloud adaptability, all-flash storage is an important pillar for addressing future storage needs.

Put simply, going all-flash is not just a nice-to-have, but rather a must-have for carriers to achieve greater success.

To support the transition to a faster, more reliable, and sustainable data center, Huawei offers a broad portfolio of products and solutions that suit various industries, workloads, and scenarios.

Learn more about our?award-winning all-flash data center solutions?and how you can build sustainable growth for your business.

To read the original article, please visit Going All-Flash: A Must for Carriers? – Huawei BLOG.

To learn more about Huawei All-Flash Data Center Solution, please visit OceanStor All-Flash Data Center - Huawei Enterprise.

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.