Huawei’s new NAS solution aims to address the biggest challenges in GenAI
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 looking to develop and deploy the technology are faced with unfathomably large amounts of data and a staggering number of files.
It’s a problem Huawei wants to solve with its powerful OceanStor A800 Network Storage Attached (NAS) device, which was first unveiled in 2023 and is getting a European appearance this week at the 2024 Innovative Data Infrastructure (IDI) Forum company in Berlin.
As with 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, processing generative AI training models from scratch, maintaining the all-important data sovereignty, and ensuring system reliability all require a mind-boggling amount of space and speed. That’s a big problem for big companies – and that’s where this uncompromising black box fits in.
Speed, space and ‘awakening data’
The OceanStor A800 fits into an admittedly niche market for businesses. We’re not talking about storage for the masses here, as nice as 500 GB per second bandwidth would be. According to Huawei, the A800 is capable of 24 million IOPS per controller enclosure, delivering ten times the performance of existing storage and ten times the data mobility. The storage also supports bandwidth in PB/s and 100 million IOPS, and boasts 99.9999% data reliability.
At IDI 2024, the company stated that the A800 “can increase AI cluster utilization by 30% and deliver high bandwidth and IOPS that are four to eight times better than its peer vendors. (The device) supports scaling to EB-level capacity with up to 512 controllers, as well as scaling to up to 4,096 computer cards.”
But it’s not all impressively large numbers 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, retrieval-augmented generation to help prevent AI hallucinations. With sustainability in mind, with energy efficiency being an even bigger issue for those working with AI data storage, the A800 clocks in at 0.7 watts/TB and a storage density of 1PB/H.
The OceanStor A800 wasn’t the only storage solution to appear at IDI, with Huawei also unveiling a sleek 128TB internal SSD that should hit the market sometime next year. This drive, Huawei said, will consume “88% less storage space and 92% less energy than comparable vendors’ SSDs in storing every PB of data.” With the rise of content creation, gaming and office digitalization, this is a product we would like to see appear in the consumer and small business markets.