Looking back at Huawei’s All-Flash Arrays (AFAs) storage journey, it’s intriguing to see how far the company has come since launching the industry first AFAs in 2009.

Huawei had been quick to pick up on how solid-state drives (SSDs) had quickly been overtaking hard drives in the marketplace and seized the opportunity to gain market share.

In 2009, Huawei launched the OceanStor Dorado 5100 Solid State Storage System. According to Huawei, the company decided on the name “Dorado” as it is one of the fastest fish, swimming up to speeds of 130km/hour, and Huawei was dedicated to delivering AFAs that offered lightning fast speeds.

The OceanStor Dorado was a game changer, offering 12GB/s maximum bandwidth, a million input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 0.5ms latency. Huawei has always had the ability to do in-depth research on what is missing in the market, but more so it asks users what their struggles are and develops products around solving these problems.

Once Huawei had successfully entered the all-flash world, it needed to ensure it stayed on top of its game, improving on its already successful array.

In 2017, the development project for the next-generation OceanStor Dorado had just been approved and it was time for Zhang Peng, the chief architect of Huawei OceanStor Dorado AFAs, to get a team together and help Huawei enter the world of high-end storage. Peng was excited that the project had been approved, but had his doubts about whether the company would be able to deliver.

OceanStor Dorado V6

For two years, the Huawei storage team worked under immense pressure to resolve the technical difficulties of new hardware, software and operating system designs to deliver the Huawei OceanStor Dorado V6.

Setting a new benchmark in storage performance and reliability for enterprises critical services, the OceanStor Dorado offers a maximum bandwidth of 800GB/s compared to the 12GB/s of the Dorado 5100. Huawei also managed to increase the maximum IOPS to 20 million and improve the latency to 0.1ms. Thanks to the exceptional dedication and hard work from the Huawei team, they not only made Huawei the leading vendor in the Chinese market, but also the fastest growing vendor worldwide.

“The growth of this market, including the expansion into NVMe technology, is increasing the speed at which we can access information. We cannot say what the future holds, but data is already worth more than some rare minerals in our current economy. Access to data is no longer enough for this world — effective, fast and good quality data at the click of a button is what we need to drive the world forward and Huawei is on the leading edge pushing the boundaries and getting ready for tomorrow,” said James Nel, Huawei product manager at Pinnacle ICT.

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