Today, the third Huawei data storage user elite Forum was held in Xining. Dr. Zhou Yuefeng, vice president of Huawei and president of data storage product line, delivered a keynote speech on "Let's meet new opportunities in the storage industry together", proposing that data storage will surely become China's second technology business card after 5G, only by relying on advanced storage power and saving power can China become the leader in the global AI competition.

I am very glad to be here in the cool Xining today to discuss the topic of storage industry with all the new and old friends, customers and partners. Today, I would like to take this opportunity to review Huawei's experience in the storage industry and look forward to the future changes in China's storage industry and the global storage industry.

Human beings have existed on the earth for millions of years, but the real rapid development of human civilization has also happened for nearly thousands of years. The emergence of information records and words enables human beings to record and inherit experience and knowledge, so as to carry out group learning and replication and promote the rapid development of human civilization. The generation and recording of information is crucial to the future development of human civilization and science and technology. As storage people, we are full of pride. We are exactly the group of people who can record and use information well.

At present, AI big models are very popular, and algorithms are of course important. However, in the era of "group models dancing", big model algorithms themselves do not have that much commercial value, I think the technology and business leaders of AI industry need to realize the business logic and the importance of knowledge base in the development process of AI. Knowledge base is stored in storage. Self-learning and evolution of large models require knowledge base to provide more valuable information. Only by combining knowledge base with large models can self-evolution and self-learning be generated. Therefore, some people say "lack of data and AI", which I think is very reasonable. Therefore, in the future AI big model era, advanced data storage is the key to whether we can lead and seize the opportunity of this era.

Data

storage Channel

it can be said that Huawei entered the storage industry by accident and went through many hardships in the middle. In 2001, Huawei realized that our self-built IT system, huge finance and research and development of IT systems all need a good storage system, so we have the investment in storage. However, three years later, we found it too difficult to compete in storage technology and commercial cashing. There were only four people left in a team of hundreds of people. Fortunately, two of these four people are still in our team today and have become leaders.

When we confidently developed the first generation of storage products, we were full of hope for them, but we encountered many problems when the products were put on the market. In that year, a large number of customer complaints were caused due to the instability of the hard disk. But what I want to say is that the joy of overcoming the technological gap is always left to brave and tough people.

In 2008, we once thought about whether to develop our own high-end storage, which was controversial at that time. We can't even understand the early high-end storage architecture in the industry. Foreign experts told us that it is impossible for Chinese research and development teams to build an Active-Active dual-Active architecture. After two to three years of development, we launched a new generation of OceanStor Dorado high-end all-flash memory in 2020 to overcome the problem of Active-Active dual-Active architecture and achieved great success after it was introduced to the market, we have become one of the only three teams with high-end storage research and development capabilities in the world, namely Dell EMC, HDS and Huawei.

Similarly, in 2008, we were also thinking about whether we should enter NAS storage in a wider market instead of SAN storage. However, we stopped at that time, because many experts said that NAS was too difficult, too complex features and too difficult algorithms, and problems such as the performance of large and small files needed to be solved. It is this group of people in 2020 that we must make a better NAS storage decision again.

After two years of development, our NAS storage performance has completely surpassed that of friends. In some overseas projects, we started to compete and test with our friends with uneasy mood, but the test results often exceeded our expectations, and we could achieve two or three times or even higher performance of our friends. Today, we are fully confident that our NAS storage can compete with or even lead the world-class NAS vendors in terms of performance and feature richness. However, this process is hard. We have experienced more than ten years of inner anxiety and dare not move forward.

In this world, if you want to be ahead, you must overcome many difficulties. In 2019, we encountered the "516" incident again, which caused great waves inside and outside Huawei. Can we continue to do storage? In the past, we used code from the Western Open Source community for many parts. What should we do in the future?

It took us a year to replace more than 1,000 domestic components. While adopting the new hardware scheme, we also need to ensure the reliability is equivalent to that of the past. We have also modified more than one million lines of code to transform all the open source community code used in the past into self-developed. We have also received support from many suppliers to solve the problem of continuous supply to customers. We also work with supply chain partners to overcome many difficulties and solve problems such as certification and compatibility.

In the first half of this year, our revenue growth rate in the overseas storage market exceeded 60%, and these achievements also proved the toughness and bravery of our group of people. For a system with complex software and hardware, it is very difficult to control the fate in your own hands. Up to now, every capacitor and inductance can stand the test of supply. In terms of the most critical chips, we have all developed and continuously evolved. Our more than 40 million lines of code are all typed out by engineers, so we can assure our countrymen that it is trustworthy to store the data on Huawei's storage, it is safe.

Today, the development of Huawei storage is also supported and helped by scientists and researchers all over the world. We have a large research team overseas and hold a global compression algorithm competition every year, by absorbing these knowledge and experience, our data compression and data coding technologies are far ahead of those of friends. Every year, we issue "Olympus" technical problems to global scientists and give them incentives to encourage global scientists and us to continuously overcome them and ensure the prosperity of the storage industry.

Of course, our progress cannot be achieved without the support of our customers and partners. Through joint innovation with customers and partners, we jointly define products; Through TOPN improvement topics, we continuously listen to everyone's opinions and make improvements spontaneously; More importantly, together with our storage MVP, strengthen communication and communication through Circle activities, so that we can hear the truest feedback and improve as quickly as possible.

Any persistence

there must be gains

Because of unremitting persistence, our products have made continuous progress in the past ten years. High-end all-flash memory storage was launched in 2019. it supports SAN and NAS, and supports Active-Active dual-Active. It meets the high reliability of "8 Bad 7" and is still ahead of our competitors today.

In 2020, the new OceanStor Pacific series of high-performance distributed storage was launched. It supports the integration of various data protocols and is far ahead in distributed file performance. In the latest IO500 list, more than 15 times ahead of the best record in history.

In 2021, we launched OceanProtect X8000 high-end backup storage, as well as better-performance backup software. After its launch, whether at home or abroad, its backup speed and backup efficiency are far ahead of the industry benchmark. At the same time, our super-integration products still exist tenaciously, especially the super-integration of Luan Peng formed by combining Huawei's own Luan Peng and shengteng, which passed the Xinchuang evaluation of China Institute of Information Technology in the first batch. In addition, this year, we also launched a hyper-integration product integrating AI training and reasoning.

With such persistence, Huawei storage has won the trust of more than 25000 enterprise users worldwide, serving more than 150 countries and regions; Among the top 100 banks in the world, we serve 47 of them. At the same time, Huawei storage also serves the central banks of many countries and carries the monetary settlement system, which is the trust of a country's financial system in Huawei storage.

We have been selected as the leader of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for seven consecutive years, and our annual rating continues to grow. Distributed storage and primary storage are also the best users of Gartner.

Overcome the market volume

only innovation and evolution

but today's Chinese storage market is extremely internal. There are many manufacturers and teams rushing to the tide in China, and everyone hopes to gain short-term benefits through price competition. This leads to the current situation that the Chinese market is very internal. In this internal market, our team realized that we should work hand in hand to the outside, and future-oriented innovation is our foundation. I call on the entire storage industry, we should not be internal volumes, we should seek market and growth through continuous evolution and innovation.

In the past, Huawei continued to innovate its product form and launched a series of innovative products, such as All-Flash distributed storage, data security all-in-one machine, and deep learning data Lake storage. At the China Super Computing Conference just finished yesterday, he won the Best Innovation Award of "best AI power base; for the AI big model era, it provides a training/push-and-super integrated machine for AI big model training and inference design to accelerate the efficient deployment of AI big models.

We have also done a lot of practices in data center architecture innovation. For large data centers on the cloud and the Internet, traditional architectures cannot effectively manage local disks of servers. They should sink to the smart disk frame and use OceanDisk-like smart disk frame products based on the Diskless architecture, only such an architecture is flexible, scalable, and manageable.

We have also done a lot of "calculating by saving strength. With the open-source CANTIAN database acceleration engine, we are working with many database vendors in China to make our reliability and availability exceed that of Oracle databases. We also introduce computing storage to provide more computing power in storage. In-storage computing makes the entire system more efficient. In addition, for partners, we have launched Huawei Blue Whale app Mall, which can directly integrate application software with Huawei's computing storage and hyper-Integration online, it is convenient for partners to quickly form their own solutions for customers.

China's data storage industry is facing unprecedented opportunities. No matter from the underlying chips, software and supporting ecology, a complete industrial chain has been formed. There are not only Huawei but also many other Chinese manufacturers in the Global Storage Industry Report. China's storage industry is full of vitality. In the Internet era, 5G is China's first technology business card. I believe that in the ICT industry, data storage will definitely become China's second technology business card in the world.

Today, China's total data volume exceeds 23ZB, and its annual compound data growth rate ranks first in the world, reaching 26.3%. China will definitely become a data power, but we should become a data power. Many national ministries and companies have actively paid attention to and participated in the construction of advanced data storage. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently released the white paper on China's storage, which further defined the advanced data storage, guide provinces and industries to build advanced storage capacity, which will become the second technology business card for the future career of Chinese storage people and the data storage we expect in the future, this is a great good news.

There are already many computing power centers (including intelligent computing centers) in our country, and more and more computing power centers will appear in the future. I have seen many provinces take advantage of data backup and disaster recovery to gather data together. And through the data operation company, the collected data elements are circulated to generate greater value. Today, when the power of deposit is becoming more and more important, more and more advanced power centers will surely appear in China, so that we can have a motherland with a civilization of five thousand years and further accelerate the process of civilization.

The three core powers of the data center are power, computing power and capacity. Computing power infrastructure is crucial for China's continuous leadership in the future Internet era, especially in the AI era. However, it is temporarily impossible for us to gain global leadership in our computing power in the next 5 to 10 years. Through data storage and strong computing, the entire computing power infrastructure can be ahead of the world.

Lack of data and AI. Relying on advanced power and calculating by saving strength, I believe that China will become the leader in the global AI competition. Thank you.