This year's Huawei genius youth project once again detonated the eye. One is to "counterattack" from an ordinary undergraduate to become a Ph.D. student at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, becoming the only young talent with the highest annual salary this year; The other is a doctor of beauty, who publishes papers in a variety of A-level journals, integrating wisdom and beauty. These two successful finalists of Huazhong University of Science and Technology quickly became hot topics in the streets.

It is worth noting that the research directions of the two talented Huawei teenagers shortlisted this year are closely related to data storage. Therefore, these two people unanimously chose Huawei to do storage-related research, which makes people have to sigh that Huawei Storage attaches importance to basic research and talents.

In fact, since 18 years ago was officially launched, Huawei's storage development has been in close contact with major university research institutions. University research institutions are not only an important source of Huawei's storage talents, but also an important partner of Huawei's storage infrastructure joint innovation. At present, Huawei storage has grown into an important manufacturer of Top 5 in the world and Top 1 in China. In the production, learning, research and application of storage technology, a value closed loop is gradually explored, which really accelerates the innovation of basic research and feeds back the innovation of basic research with market results.

Take the beautiful doctor who was shortlisted for the gifted youth project as an example. One of her research directions is nonvolatile memory (NVM) and NVMe protocol, which are the most important technical trends of storage products today, and Huawei storage is a well-deserved leader of end-to-end NVMe all-flash memory. The closed-loop value of Huawei's storage in production, learning, research and use is vividly reflected in the storage segmentation field of end-to-end NVMe all-flash.

The martial arts in the world are fast and unbreakable.

Similarly, in storage products, performance is one of the important indicators to measure whether storage is excellent or not. The higher the IO, the lower the delay per unit time and the better the storage performance, which also means that more applications can be loaded, business requests can be responded in time, and the user experience is better.

NVMe is a fast martial art about storage. If the SAS protocol designed for mechanical hard disk is compared to a provincial road with many traffic lights and many bayonets; Then the NMVe protocol specially designed for flash memory is an unlimited speed highway. At first glance, NVMe can really make data fly, but how to make NVMe, a data highway, more reasonable and smarter, and make data "not roll over" on the highway absolutely needs years of practice and constant polishing to achieve.

This is because in the data network of data center, IO paths involve servers, storage, networks and other devices, as well as network protocols such as FC, IP, IB, PCIe, SAS, etc., which often face challenges such as long data transmission paths and mutual conversion of protocols. Therefore, the landing of NVMe often "affects the whole body", which requires the planning and design of the data transmission network of the entire data center. Only one or two NVMe SSDs or NVMe flash controllers are not enough.

Huawei is the top player in NVMe's all-flash memory field, and it is not an exaggeration to describe it as an "old driver". As one of the manufacturers with the largest number of SSD disk-level patents in the storage industry, Huawei has conducted long-term and in-depth research on NVMe protocol, developed the only end-to-end NVMe SSD disk, NVMe flash controller and NVMe all-flash operating system in the industry, and took the lead in realizing a full range of end-to-end NVMe all-flash in the industry.

How did Huawei do it? Let's find out.

Huawei attaches great importance to NVMe because it is closely related to flash memory and is the key to release the performance potential of flash memory. As early as 2005, Huawei began to study flash memory, which has profound insight and practice on how NVMe landed and how its value was realized.

2065 438+00 NVMe was originally born as a hard disk interface protocol, which fully released the performance of flash memory. However, in order to truly release the performance of data centers including computing, storage and network, NVMe as a hard disk interface protocol is far from enough. Therefore, after years of development, NVMe has gradually developed into the field of storage networks, and NVMe over RoCE technology was born.

As a new generation of high-performance storage technology, NVMe over ROCE (Non-volatile Memory Express over Remote Direct Access Memory over Converged Ethernet) combines NVME protocol with RDMA technology in the network field, and its appearance really makes the data superhighway in the data center become a unified network, which has many advantages such as performance, networking convenience, scheme cost and so on. However, it also faces some challenges, such as link fault perception time, network experiment stability and deployment convenience.

To this end, Huawei gathered the strength of the company's heavyweight product line, enhanced the standard NVMe over RoCE scheme from two aspects of storage and network, and launched the NOF+ enhancement scheme.

In terms of products, Huawei is the only manufacturer in the industry that develops NVMe SSD disks, NVMe flash controllers and NVMe all-flash operating systems end to end, and takes the lead in realizing the full range of end-to-end NVMe all-flash.

For example, last year, Huawei newly launched OceanStor storage Dorado series, with a performance of up to 20 million IOPS and a limit delay of 0.05ms, which is far superior to similar products in supermarkets.

In Huawei OceanStor Dorado series all-flash memory, 32G FC-NVMe and NVMe Over 100G RDMA all-IP networking design are provided at the same time, so that the front-end network connection, back-end hard disk frame connection and horizontal expansion controller interconnection all adopt the same network protocol; OceanStor stores Dorado series all-flash memory, and also designs a set of IO scheduling mechanism for NVMe, which completely cancels the disk-level mutex lock on the original IO path, avoids the queue lock conflict when IO is issued, reduces the software overhead, and achieves the best performance.

In addition, Huawei OceanStor storage Dorado series all-flash memory is optimized for NVMe at the operating system level. Smart chip and FlashLink intelligent algorithm give full play to the advantages of multi-core, and improve the hit rate of read cache, shorten batch processing time and greatly improve performance and efficiency through intelligent learning and statistical IO rules.

In order to make the data highway more stable and reliable, Huawei OceanStor has stored Dorado series all-flash memory, which provides sufficient protection at the component level.

For example, in order to increase the reliability of ports, Huawei's self-developed SSD supports native dual-port technology instead of using internal switches to realize dual ports. The ports are independent of each other and do not affect each other, providing a solid hardware foundation and reliability for the entire all-flash memory; In addition, through years of accumulation of PCI-E technology, Huawei has perfect PCI-E link management, exception handling and hot plug technology, which supports SSD disks to be pulled out at any time in any way, provides end-to-end PCI-E system reliability, and ensures non-proliferation when a single disk is replaced or fails.

Aiming at the situation that large-capacity SSD is easy to cause data loss, Huawei OceanStor storage Dorado series all-flash memory adopts innovative RAID-TP software technology, based on erasure codes algorithm, which can tolerate data loss and business interruption when three disks fail at the same time. Huawei has become the only vendor in the industry that can tolerate three disk failures at the same time, and it is also the only vendor among the three vendors that can realize efficient reconfiguration of15min /TB, and the reconfiguration speed is 20 times ahead of the other two vendors. Huawei OceanStor storage Dorado series all-flash memory also has complete data protection technologies such as snapshot, cloning and remote replication.

At present, Huawei has accumulated more than 1000 successful cases of NVMe all-flash memory through more than ten years of technology accumulation, covering many fields such as finance, government, manufacturing and energy.

For example, nanhua futures, founded in 1996, is a national futures company Top 10, mainly engaged in futures brokerage, asset management, securities investment and other businesses. Nanhua futures rents data centers of HKEx, Zhengshang Institute, Shenzhen Stock Exchange, Jiaxing Unicom, PCCW and other industries and VIP computer rooms and cabinets of telecom operators, and deploys trading systems nearby.

There is only one purpose to do this: "one step ahead." Nanhua futures's business is a typical "time is money", and a little time difference may often bring about great changes in profits. This transaction business determines that its delay requirement is extremely low, usually less than that of 1 Ms. nanhua futures's deployment of Huawei OceanStor storage Dorado flash hosting integrated trading platform, which is not only stable and reliable, but also improves its performance by three times, providing investors with an excellent user experience.

It can be said that Huawei's "one step ahead" storage makes users "one step ahead" in business.

After 18 years' efforts, Huawei Storage has grown into a global Top 5 and China Top 1 manufacturer, with 12 R&D centers, more than 4,000 R&D engineers and more than 800 storage patents, serving more than12,000 users in various industries around the world.

In these eighteen years, technological innovation is the belief of Huawei storage. The pace of technological innovation has never stopped Huawei's breakthroughs in high-end storage architecture, NVMe, intelligent storage and other fields, and has gradually grown from a market follower to a well-deserved technology leader in the industry. Last year, Huawei Storage set up the "Olympus Award" for the first time, aiming at solving the technical problems of data infrastructure and encouraging and rewarding researchers who have made breakthrough contributions in the field of global data infrastructure.

In the future, with the continuous participation of more talented teenagers and other Huawei talents, Huawei Storage is expected to show more wonderful performances in the center of the stage.