It used to be said that the competitive game in the data storage market has game Over.
In the seemingly stable market pattern, Inspur Storage has risen strongly in recent years, proving with eye-catching results that breaking the game is still feasible. In the first half of this year, Inspur Storage handed over a beautiful report card: its high-end all-flash memory and distributed storage won the first place in the SPC-1 test, and the overall shipment volume in the first half of the year ranked among the top five in the world, and distributed storage entered the top three in the second storage market and the second in China's storage market share...
Therefore, Peng Zhen, president of Inspur Information, dared to say at the IDTC 2021 Inspur Storage Data Technology Summit: "I hope that Inspur Storage will become the first in the Chinese market in the future." "This is the expectation and spur of the Inspur storage business, and I hope that inspur storage will go further, continue to maintain the momentum of rapid growth, and write a page belonging to inspur storage for the development of the market."
On the occasion of the official release of the new generation of G6 storage platform for Inspur Storage, Li Hui, general manager of Inspur Storage Product Line, clearly stated that the core strategy for the future is to adhere to technological innovation and storage as a platform, increase investment in research and development of new storage-related technologies, and promote the development of storage as a platform.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > deep ploughing technology, and the four characteristics of G6 further enhance product strength</h1>
Back in March 2019, Inspur Storage released a new generation of G5 storage products, which is Inspur Storage's "cloud storage intelligent use, operation and research new data" strategy to create a new generation of storage products, the core purpose is to meet the changing new data needs. Starting with G5 storage, Inspur began to focus on the creation of seven major capabilities such as minimalist architecture and extreme performance.
Today, the new generation of G6 storage platform is officially unveiled, marking the re-improvement of inspur storage product strength. It is reported that the G6 centralized storage platform has HF5000 G6, HF6000 G6, HF8000 G6, HF18000 G6 four models, a variety of configurations, to meet various needs, HF18000 G6 test performance can reach 30 million; G6 distributed storage platform provides AS13000G6 general-purpose, performance- type, general capacity, high-density capacity four types of different configurations, the same platform, the same architecture supports four different nodes, Support for four different protocols further simplifies management and operations.
Li Hui, General Manager of Inspur Storage Product Line
Li Hui believes that data is becoming the most important means of production for enterprises and institutions in the digital age, and users hope that data infrastructure can serve always online, data will never be lost, performance will never end, and capacity will always be sufficient; to this end, the new generation of G6 platform will help users build a safe, reliable, economical and efficient data infrastructure on the basis of seven extreme capabilities.
Specifically, the G6 storage platform data life cycle to provide security protection; in terms of reliability, G6 from the components, devices, the whole machine system, core software, management software, solutions six levels to build a leading reliability, to provide a guarantee for business continuity, such as based on active-active, three data center technology, can achieve inter-site RPO (fault recovery point objective) to achieve 0, RTO (recovery time target) close to 0; and based on iCAP space management technology, can increase the life of flash disks by 100%. It achieves 5:1-byte data reduction, 95% of the space available, and one pool of multi-protocol access, which further reflects the economic advantages of the G6 storage platform.
In addition, the G6 storage platform also has a newly developed flash-native "iTurbo 2.0 Intelligent Acceleration Engine", which combines dozens of performance optimization algorithms of four major technologies such as intelligent IO awareness, intelligent fast path, intelligent resource scheduling, and intelligent data organization with flash disks, so that tens of millions of IO are balanced and dropped, and the lowest latency in the industry is reached, and the performance of the storage system is exerted to the extreme.
Li Hui introduced that compared with the previous generation of G5 storage platforms, G6 has greatly upgraded in software and hardware. In terms of hardware, the distributed storage G6 platform will fully adopt Inspur's self-developed SSD products, which is conducive to the optimization of interoperability between the controller and the medium, and will continue to improve the support for multiple computing power such as XPU; at the software level, the G6 storage platform has completed the upgrade of various software functions, and has been greatly optimized at the algorithm and protocol levels.
In fact, in the past, because the business scale and changes were relatively stable, the demand for data storage was relatively fixed, making the replacement cycle of storage products has been long. Today, with the explosion of new data, the demand for new storage is also changing, making the innovation of storage products and technologies also accelerated. From G2 in 2017 to G5 in 2019 to G6 this year, the reason why Inspur Storage has been able to achieve an iteration of a product version in two years and quickly meet market demand is due to its storage-as-a-platform strategy throughout.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="83" > storage as a platform to release data vitality</h1>
At present, data storage, as the core of data infrastructure, has become the foundation for the digital transformation of enterprises and institutions, and it is necessary to have comprehensive and sufficient capabilities to support data centers and meet the new needs of user business in the digital era. Storage platforming is conducive to the inclusiveness of storage products, building comprehensive capabilities, and rapid iteration and response to different scenarios, so as to truly exert the value of data infrastructure and release data vitality.
Therefore, platforming must be an important trend in the future of data storage. In Li Hui's view, Inspur is gradually building four platform products: centralized platform, distributed platform, backup platform and archiving platform, and even in the future, there will be platform products for specific scenarios.
However, building a storage platform is not an easy task, it is a comprehensive test of storage manufacturers' key technical understanding, software and hardware research and development capabilities, project management capabilities, and it is a step-by-step, iterative development of the idea, it is impossible to achieve overnight in the short term. Therefore, it is clear that Inspur Storage also follows the above guidelines from the G2 storage platform in 2017 to the G5 storage platform in 2019 to the G6 storage platform this year.
Nowadays, Inspur Storage has built a full-stack technical capability from five levels: components and devices, storage machines, storage underlying software, centralized and distributed storage software, and storage management software, laying a solid foundation for the storage as a platform strategy.
As can be seen from the G6 storage platform, the Inspur storage platform strategy is evolving in two directions: one is horizontal interconnection, and the other is vertical and widely compatible.
The so-called horizontal interconnection, that is, to ensure the free flow of data between different products on the G6 platform, through a pool of multi-protocol access, to achieve data flow between different protocols of files, blocks, objects, big data; through data migration and heterogeneous virtualization technology, to achieve data flow between devices in the platform.
Sun Bin, chief architect of Inspur Storage, introduced that the Inspur Storage R&D team has adopted a modular approach in the construction of the platform, through decoupling, so that many algorithms and components can be reused to the greatest extent, and after decoupling, the speed of product development and innovation will be accelerated, not only allowing different products to reuse some core functions and algorithms, but also achieving end-to-end optimization, making product management and data flow easier.
Vertical compatibility is upward compatibility with various application management platforms, and compatible with multiple computing power, multiple media, multiple servers, heterogeneous acceleration and other modules. At present, users are facing a hybrid cloud environment, data often need to be moved and applied between hybrid clouds according to business needs, which requires data infrastructure must be able to achieve the docking of various application management platforms including cloud, big data, etc., to achieve seamless docking between data and applications; secondly, data center hardware has ushered in a wave of innovation, the rise of heterogeneous computing has brought a large number of XPU, DPU, NPU and other hardware, data storage to the platform of the idea of development, It is very conducive to the compatibility of downward multi-service, heterogeneous acceleration and other modules, and fully release the vitality of data.
"Diversification, macro-quantification and platformization are the three major challenges of data infrastructure, and storage platforming is the only way for the future development of data infrastructure." Li Hui introduced, "In addition, the platform must be a group, not an individual. ”
Therefore, Inspur Storage deeply realizes that in the new data era, the outbreak of smart application scenarios, and the complexity of the relationship between data infrastructure and solution level, in order to make the storage as a platform strategy better landed, it is necessary to unite all kinds of partners and users to take the "business scenario" as the guide and solve the various challenges brought by new data by building a scene community.
Li Hui revealed that Inspur Storage will continue to expand the scene community ecology, and will include more forces like scientific research institutions in the future, and will accelerate the layout of inspur storage expert service system, practice the concept of research and development as a service, and provide more technical capabilities and resource support for users' core application scenarios.
"Storage as a platform is the foundation for all of this." Li Hui said.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="84" > continue to break the game and challenge higher goals</h1>
The data storage sector has always been known for its high technical thresholds and market access thresholds. For many years, it has been a small number of manufacturers playing the leading role, and few fresh faces have appeared. However, with the accumulation of inspur storage for many years, it has spared no effort in strategic investment and core technology breakthroughs, and has formed a continuous breakthrough trend in the past two years.
In 2020, Inspur Storage has grown by more than 50% for four consecutive quarters, becoming the only manufacturer in the industry to achieve such a growth rate, leading the Chinese market with a growth rate of 20 times the industry; in the first quarter of 2021, Inspur storage has achieved high-speed growth of 60% and 100% in the two fields of all-flash storage and distributed storage, respectively, officially ranking among the top five in the world; in the second quarter of 2021, Inspur storage shipments have maintained the top five in the world, gradually standing on the first team.
In addition, in Gartner's 2020 Global Master Storage Magic Quadrant Report, Inspur Storage is the only storage vendor in the report to leapfrog the quadrant due to its improvement in foresight and execution, from the Niche Quadrant to the Challenger Quadrant.
Today's wave has indeed laid a solid foundation for the continuous breaking of the game.
First of all, with the blessing of strategic investment, Inspur Storage has completed the breakthrough of core technology self-research, becoming one of the few manufacturers in the industry with full-stack technology capabilities, and after multiple generations of product polishing and innovation, G6 storage platform has a leading product force in the market.
Secondly, Inspur Storage has been deeply involved in the fields of finance, telecommunications, transportation, and scientific research for many years, focusing on smart application scenarios, and has a deep understanding and rich practice of new storage needs in various industries, which is closely in line with user needs.
Third, Inspur Storage is enriching its own ecology, and through cooperation with scientific research institutions, it will continuously enhance its innovation ability and ecological ability, and inject continuous impetus into the development of business scenarios.
"Technology will always be the main driving force for the sustained growth of Inspur's business." Li Hui finally said.