When it comes to data storage, it's fair to say that AI has had a destabilizing effect on the industry as a whole, as companies seeking to develop and deploy the technology are faced with unfathomably large amounts of data and a dizzying amount of files.
It's a problem Huawei is looking to solve with its high-performance OceanStor A800 network attached storage (NAS) device, first revealed in 2023, and this week it will have a European presentation at the Innovative Data Infrastructure (IDI) Forum 2024 of the company in Berlin.
Like Huawei's Dorado and Pacific NAS devices, the focus here is on AI data storage. Huawei calls it the “new data paradigm” and an “accelerated data awakening.” Building and processing generative AI training models from scratch, maintaining critical data sovereignty, and ensuring system reliability all require a surprisingly large amount of space and speed. That's a big problem for large companies, and that's where this uncompromising black box fits into the picture.
Speed, space and 'awakening data'
The OceanStor A800 fits into a certainly niche business market. We're not talking storage for the masses here, as nice as 500GB per second of bandwidth is. According to Huawei, the A800 is capable of achieving 24 million IOPS per controller enclosure, delivering ten times the performance of existing storage and ten times the data mobility. The storage also supports PB/s bandwidth and 100 million IOPS, and features 99.9999% data reliability.
At IDI 2024, the company claimed that the A800 “can increase AI cluster utilization by 30% and offers high bandwidth and IOPS, which are four and eight times better than its peer vendor. [The device] supports expansion to EB-level capacity with up to 512 controllers, as well as expansion to a maximum of 4,096 compute cards.”
But it's not all impressive figures and high speeds. In addition to NAS, popular in the genAI world, the company also supports what it calls the “new data paradigms”: tensor, vector, and augmented recovery generation to help prevent AI hallucinations. With an eye on sustainability, with energy efficiency being an even bigger issue facing those working with AI data storage, the A800 achieves a speed of 0.7 watts/TB and a storage density of 1 PB/ OR.
The OceanStor A800 wasn't the only storage solution to appear at IDI, with Huawei also revealing a slim 128TB internal SSD set to launch next year. This drive, Huawei said, “will consume 88% less storage space and 92% less power than other vendors' SSDs when storing each PB of data.” With the rise of content creation, gaming, and office digitization, that's a product we wouldn't mind seeing reach the consumer and small business market.
