From investing 2 billion yuan in storage research and development for five years, to winning the third place in the Chinese storage market, to AS 56000G2 winning the first SPC-1 benchmark test, Inspur storage is completing its transformation and becoming a "counterattack" for Chinese storage vendors model.
Many people are curious about the logic behind the rapid growth of Inspur storage. In fact, it is also worth exploring and thinking: whether Inspur storage can go further, pierce that layer of window paper, and give the market and partners more imagination, which is precisely A difficult but significant thing.
This difficulty lies in: on the one hand, the enterprise storage market is already a relatively stable market. IDC's latest forecast indicates that the global storage market will stabilize in the next five years. If you want a market with relatively stable market capacity and competitors, To achieve greater breakthroughs, there is no way out except for the melee of the bayonet, and its difficulty can be imagined; on the other hand, in a relatively stable market, facing the rapid growth caused by new technologies and new demands In terms of market segmentation, can Inspur Storage seize such fleeting market opportunities.
Today, when China takes the lead in the wave of "new infrastructure", it is like a wind blowing from the east. This is a good market opportunity for Inspur storage, and it is more like another time for its products, technologies, solutions, and partner systems. Big exam.
Store the role played in the "new infrastructure"
"New infrastructure", as the most popular vocabulary in recent times, is essentially a clear signal that the country is accelerating the development of the digital economy. As we all know, whether it is national policy or industry consensus, the digital economy is the next engine of the Chinese economy, and accelerating the pace of digitalization in all walks of life has become a general trend. The "new infrastructure" is precisely an important carrier for the development of the digital economy, supporting the integration of 5G, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and other digital technologies with the real economy.
As Inspur proposed, the intelligent computing center is the new infrastructure in the era of wisdom, and will become an important infrastructure necessary for social operation in the era of digital economy. Among them, what kind of role will storage play in the intelligent computing center and the "new infrastructure"?
Inspur first proposed the new storage way
In Inspur's view, the intelligent computing center will become the most important computing power production center and a win-win center in the future. With the fusion architecture computing system as the platform and data as the resource, it can drive the AI model to perform deep processing of the data with powerful computing power. , A variety of smart computing services are constantly being generated and supplied to organizations and individuals in the form of cloud services through the network.
"The new infrastructure will bring multi-source data, complicated applications, and real-time service response. These actually require the storage in the intelligent computing center to shoulder the important task of data processing, and the data can be stored, used, managed, and scheduled. Therefore, when entering the construction phase of the new infrastructure, there needs to be better technologies and solutions to match at the storage level, "said Li Hui, general manager of Inspur storage product line.
In fact, the "new infrastructure" is indeed able to bring greater market opportunities, and 5G, industrial Internet, new energy, smart transportation and other sources of continuous data are generated. Li Hui believes that the data has undergone a fundamental change now, from the past "manual collection and manual intervention" to the current "machine generation, machine processing" era, "This year, the country will accelerate the construction of 5G and other aspects, especially in the second half of the year. After the full-scale resumption of production, it will bring a very big impetus to the growth of the storage market. "
The logic behind the rise
Opportunities are often reserved for prepared people.
Before Dongfeng, the new infrastructure, Inspur Storage had already achieved extremely rapid growth in the market. Li Hui revealed that Inspur storage has achieved a growth rate of 3.9 times that of the industry in the past year, of which the growth rate of all-flash storage is as high as 677%, and the growth rate of distributed storage has reached 94%. Not only that, Inspur's centralized storage and distributed storage have been shortlisted in Gartner's magic quadrant, and ranked first in Gartner's mainstream storage manufacturers' user evaluation.
From the perspective of Big Data Online, the logic behind the rise of Inspur Storage is that Inspur Storage has a clear and accurate judgment on trends, and based on its own judgment, it has built the ultimate capabilities of storage products and continued deep cultivation of key industries and users. These The combination drives Inspur storage to gradually gain recognition in the industry.
In terms of trend judgment, Inspur Storage recognizes three important directions: first, data goes to the cloud, second, data is better given to smart applications, and third, how to manage and use all kinds of new technologies that may appear in the future data. To this end, Inspur proposed a new storage method of "intelligent use of cloud storage and new data management". Li Hui bluntly said that the new storage approach actually requires that the storage platform can provide the most cost-effective storage capacity, upwards can better support emerging applications such as cloud, number, and intelligence, and can achieve cloud-side collaboration and multi-cloud fusion hybrid cloud architecture. Accelerate data flow and improve business agility.
Inspur storage product line layout is perfect
Based on the judgment of future storage needs and application trends, Inspur has focused on creating two new storage platforms based on data and application needs: a centralized storage platform for small data-based, high-frequency trading application scenarios, and mass data / Big data-based distributed storage platform for cloud computing applications.
In fact, centralized storage and distributed storage-related products are not uncommon in the market. The decisive factor for winning the market competition is also the core product power of storage, and the ultimate ability to build storage products has been Inspur Storage ’s two years. Core strategy.
At this year's Inspur Cloud Data Center Partner Conference (IPF 2020), Inspur Storage upgraded the four extreme capabilities of the original extreme capacity, performance, architecture, and management to seven extreme capabilities, adding extreme security that automatically senses risks. The ultimate cloudification of iSCMI multi-cloud access and the ultimate stability of six protections.
Inspur Storage also announced that it will promote the integration of iTurbo intelligent engine in all products. The iTurbo intelligent engine can speed up through the four core technologies of intelligent IO sensing, intelligent multipathing, intelligent data organization, and intelligent resource scheduling.
Inspur Storage Launches iTurbo Smart Engine
It is worth noting that the current data storage requirements on the user side are changing rapidly, which further requires storage vendors to have a sensitive market demand response and flexible product strategies. Taking the hottest distributed storage platform on the market as an example, the Inspur distributed storage product AS 13000 series can be called an excellent representative in this regard, and it has derived five subdivided products that can meet the differentiation of distributed storage on the market Demand: X series adopts the industry's most advanced multi-module node, which is the industry's best miniaturized distributed storage product; H series is the main HPC application market, with the industry's highest single node throughput; P series is the industry's exclusive The distributed storage products that support Power processors have the industry's highest single-node computing power. This is undoubtedly a good choice for some industries with a deep user base of minicomputers. For the domestic chip market, Inspur also created a FT 2000+ platform-based The C series has domestically produced processor nodes with the highest performance in the industry.
Not only that, Inspur Storage also spent a lot of energy on the deep cultivation of key industries and users in the past two years. This deep cultivation is mainly reflected in the deep joint innovation of users. In this way, the user's application needs are more deeply understood, and then the corresponding storage products and solutions are matched.
At present, Inspur storage has been implemented in many industries such as finance, communications, scientific research, energy, and medical treatment. For example, Tsinghua University ’s live brain imaging research with more than 10 billion pixels per second and 72 consecutive hours; concurrent recording of over 6000 video streams of Chengdu Smart Transportation, 100 million file writes and 1 billion queries per day, etc.
Can we go further in the future
Compared with the growth of the server business in China in the past few years and the third in the world, Inspur Storage has been gradually accumulating in the past few years. After several years of rapid growth, Inspur Storage has come to the position where it pierced that layer of window paper. Whether it can achieve a key breakthrough like the server business, deep and wide is the only choice. The so-called deepening is the need to be able to further deepen at the product level to form a unique competitive advantage; and the broadening is to further cover more market areas at the market and partner level.
In fact, from the perspective of policy orientation and market environment, the pace of accelerating the construction of the digital economy in the Chinese market will not stop, which actually provides a good market environment for all storage vendors, including Inspur Storage. For example, at the policy level, in addition to the "new infrastructure" mentioned earlier, the State Council also published the "Opinions on Building a More Perfect Factor Market Allocation System and Mechanism" on April 9th, clearly proposing that "accelerating the cultivation of the data element market ", It is required to promote the exploration of data element allocation mode, remove the institutional barriers to the free flow of data, deepen the price reform of data elements, and accelerate the establishment of a sound data governance system. This undoubtedly encourages and guarantees the flow of data in policy, will further drive the enrichment of data-based application scenarios, and accelerate the construction of digital infrastructure, including storage, by users from all walks of life.
Two storage platforms of Inspur storage
In addition, the rapid changes in business application scenarios in recent years continue to drive the storage architecture layer to update, which requires storage vendors to deepen and strengthen the product architecture layer to more quickly match application changes. Li Hui admitted that the focus of Inspur storage in the next few years will be on the breakthrough of the storage architecture layer, and work on the hardware acceleration and software stack layers to make the storage architecture more suitable for the needs of applications.
Specifically, Inspur Storage will start from four aspects. First, it will accelerate the integration of hardware acceleration technologies such as SCM, QLC, AI chips, and FPGA into the storage architecture; second, improve the ubiquitous cloud computing architecture from the perspective of the entire storage software stack to solve the problems caused by data storage, flow, and analysis. Performance bottlenecks; the third is to accelerate the application of storage intelligence technology. In addition to supporting cloud, data, and intelligence applications, the free optimization and intelligent management of storage products themselves are also important directions. Finally, data security is ensured at the storage level. The data is safe and reliable.
Li Hui further revealed that the intelligent computing center is an open and converged architecture technical route. For storage, the future technology direction is a distributed storage architecture based on computing platform hardware. "The future direction is to build a unified platform architecture based on a distributed architecture, which can support large amounts of big data, as well as core small and fast data applications. However, there are still challenges in terms of reliability, cost performance, and latency. , Inspur Storage has been in the stage of technical demonstration and technical plan preparation. "
At the user level, Inspur has actually accumulated rich experience in key industries and key customers, such as operators such as China Mobile and six state-owned banks. In order to further expand market coverage, Inspur Storage's next direction is to further strengthen the strength of its partners. To this end, Inspur Storage proposed the summit plan for storage channels at this partner conference. Inspur hopes to work with partners to make further breakthroughs in sales methods and business models, and plans to become the first in the distribution market in the next 2-3 years. To this end, Inspur Storage has made a series of preparations, including providing competitive products, technology and solutions for distribution partners, and supporting the summit plan in a win-win business cooperation.
"Last year, the storage channel business achieved 100% growth. Inspur plans to invest more resources in supporting partners through the summit plan, including setting up a dedicated storage channel manager, investing more resources in partners, upgrading the certification system, etc. . We hope that Top 10 distributors will double their sales this year, "Li Hui said.
Looking back at the growth of Inspur Storage over the years, it is appropriate to use the image of “one step at a time”. Inspur Storage has been gradually forming an aggregate effect over the years in terms of products, technologies, solutions, users, and partners. Therefore, if the future wave storage is further in the market, please don't be too surprised!