In this world, there are always some people and things that make us burst into tears.
Just like the launch of Mate 60, Chinese people are excited and inspired. If a country, an industry, or a company does not want to be knocked down, it must have the spirit not to bow its head or give up.
China's data storage industry also has such a spirit: starting from scratch, overcoming difficulties and obstacles, and occupying a place in a market with extremely high technical barriers and numerous giants. Therefore, when Dr. Zhou Yuefeng, Vice President of Huawei and President of the Data Storage Product Line, recalled the hardships and perseverance along the way at this year’s Huawei Data Storage User Elite Forum, the guests present were extremely sympathetic and moved with emotion.
Today, Huawei has ranked among the top 2 in the global enterprise storage market. It has an important influence in the exploration of cutting-edge technologies and product R&D innovation in the field of data storage, and has driven the common development of a number of companies in the domestic data storage industry chain. In the near future, data storage is expected to become China’s second technological business card after 5G.
The long road through Xiongguan is as solid as iron
Like all domestic industries that build core competitiveness through independent innovation, China's storage industry has never taken shortcuts, but has achieved its current results by climbing uphill and overcoming obstacles along the way. Specifically, Chinese companies represented by Huawei spent twenty years overcoming the three major difficulties of product technology, user experience, and market recognition in the completely unfamiliar field of data storage.
Take R&D innovation in product technology as an example. When Huawei was developing high-end storage, it was questioned by foreign experts. They believed that the Chinese R&D team could not create an Active-Active dual-active architecture. However, this is absolutely not the case. In 2020, Huawei launched a new generation of OceanStor Dorado high-end all-flash memory with AA dual-active features. Its scalability and second-level fault switching capabilities far exceed the world's leading storage manufacturers.
Today, there are only three companies in the world with high-end storage R&D capabilities, and Huawei is one of them. Dr. Zhou Yuefeng said with emotion: From the first generation of storage, to high-end storage with AA active-active architecture, to NAS storage, the joy of overcoming the technological gap is always reserved for the brave and tenacious people.
If product research and development and technological innovation are about overcoming the breakthrough from 0 to 1, then passing the user experience barrier is a slow climb, painful and torturous. In fact, there are many scenes where Chinese companies such as Huawei are "taught" by users at the beginning. Huawei's experience in the market has given Huawei a deep understanding that there is no room for sloppiness in the data storage field. Respecting data, understanding needs, and being user-centered are the only rules for survival in the data storage field.
In addition, Chinese companies have gradually passed the market recognition barrier in the past two decades. After gaining a certain accumulation of products and technologies, companies like Huawei force themselves to go out bravely, establish professional sales and marketing teams in overseas markets, compete with international storage giants, and accept advice from professional consulting organizations such as IDC and Gartner. Selection.
"For example, in some overseas projects for NAS products at the beginning, we were anxious to compete with our competitors for testing. Later facts proved that Chinese companies are fully capable of competing with the world's first-class storage manufacturers, and even gradually began to take the lead. " Dr. Zhou Yuefeng said.
Today, Huawei Storage has been selected as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for seven consecutive years, and its ratings continue to grow every year. Its two major products, distributed storage and primary storage, are also Gartner's best user choices. In addition to Huawei, other Chinese storage companies have entered Gartner's Magic Quadrant, and China's storage industry has been widely recognized by major authoritative organizations around the world.
The boat has passed the Ten Thousand Mountains
Suffering is not worthy of praise, but hope is always worth pursuing.
Because suffering will not directly bring success, hope and persistence can allow us to hone our core competitiveness and hold the lifeblood of science and technology in our own hands.
Just like the "516" incident experienced by Huawei, sudden changes have a huge impact on the data storage business. Not only does it face the interruption of the supply chain of hardware such as chips, it even faces unknown risks brought by the use of a large amount of open source community code. Huawei Whether it could continue to do data storage business was unknown at the time.
Faced with such changes, Huawei Data Storage did not sit back and feel sorry for itself. Instead, it tenaciously retained hope and persistence despite numerous difficulties. It spent a year replacing more than 1,000 domestic components at the hardware level and ensuring new hardware solutions. Its performance, reliability, stability and other aspects are on par with past capabilities; at the same time, Huawei has completed the replacement of past open source community code with more than one million lines of self-developed code. Huawei worked with its supply chain partners to overcome many difficulties and resolve a series of follow-up issues such as certification and compatibility.
"Storage is a system with both complex software and complex hardware. It is very difficult to control your destiny entirely in your own hands. Today, every capacitor and every inductor in Huawei's storage products can withstand the test. " Dr. Zhou Yuefeng said.
In fact, all greatness is "survived", the phoenix is reborn from the ashes. Just like Huawei's data storage business, after this battle, there have been two huge gains: First, Huawei's data storage has built a R&D team that brings together the world's leading talents in the process of overcoming many difficulties. This has also become the mainstay of Huawei's data storage business in recent years. The key factors for rapid growth and strong entry into the global Top 2.
Secondly, the sudden and huge difficulties have also reversely promoted the improvement of Huawei's data storage innovation. Even if you are treated unfairly, you must run faster and further than others to stand out in the fierce market competition.
Today, Huawei data storage has formed an industry-leading product innovation mechanism and route. In recent years, it has successively released high-reliability high-end all-flash storage that supports SAN & NAS integrated active-active and controller "8 bad 7", and the high-performance OceanStor Pacific series. Distributed storage, OceanProtect X8000 high-end backup storage and FusionCube A3000 training/pushing hyper-converged all-in-one machine designed for AI large model training and inference, innovative products are blooming in many places and are overwhelmed.
"All the more than 40 million lines of code for Huawei's data storage were typed out line by line by engineers, and we will continue to promote full-stack self-research on storage. We assure the Chinese people that data stored on Huawei storage is the most trustworthy and secure. Zhou Yuefeng said confidently.
The road ahead is long and bright
Looking back on the past two decades, China's data storage industry has gone from taking baby steps in the SAN storage era, to struggling to explore and seek breakthroughs when entering high-end storage, to thriving in the big data era and competing side by side with the world. China's data storage industry It has gradually spread out and grown vigorously, and its influence in the global data storage industry has begun to take shape. Whether it is the selection of consulting organizations such as Gartner and IDC, or the product testing of authoritative evaluation organizations such as SPC, there are many Chinese manufacturers.
Today, China's data storage industry has formed a complete industrial chain in terms of underlying chips, hardware, software and supporting ecosystem. Facing the coming AI era, China's data storage industry is facing an unprecedented opportunity to become bigger and stronger.
According to Dr. Zhou Yuefeng, as the world's largest data circle, China's digital economy has developed rapidly in recent years, with an annual data compound growth rate of 26.3% ranking first in the world, bringing broad prospects to the data storage industry. China's data storage industry still has a long way to go from big to strong. At present, it needs to focus on two aspects to truly realize the data industry from big to strong.
One is to seize the opportunities in the AI era. In the AI era, computing power comes first, and China has built multiple computing power centers. With the deepening of the construction of computing power system, the value of data elements is gradually released, and the importance of data storage is also accelerated. The storage center will become the focus of infrastructure construction in the future. This is a rare opportunity for China's data storage industry.
"The circulation of data elements is accelerating and generating greater value, and storage capacity will inevitably become more and more important. In the future, more and more advanced storage centers will appear in China." Dr. Zhou Yuefeng said, "In the AI era, through data storage and Depositing and strong computing can make the overall computing infrastructure lead the world."
The second is to reject involution and jointly protect the healthy development of the industry. Due to the broad market prospects, many manufacturers and teams have emerged in the Chinese market to follow the trend. Many participants have poured into the market and brought about price wars, resulting in a very involutional situation in the Chinese market. As we all know, the data storage industry is a field with high technical thresholds and high product added value. Market participants first need to learn to respect data. Storage products often require a large number of technical talents to repeatedly polish them before they can meet users' comprehensive requirements for data performance, security, reliability, etc. , blindly pursuing a low-price strategy will only disrupt the market, and may even fall into a vicious cycle, stagnating the already well-developed data storage industry.
Therefore, China's data storage industry should stop involution, achieve continuous progress in products, technologies and solutions through innovation, and join hands to go global, using good technology, good products and good solutions to show their talents in a broader market.
"In the Internet era, 5G is China's first technological business card; the road ahead is long and bright, and data storage will definitely become China's second technological business card." Dr. Zhou Yuefeng said in the end.