Information and communications technology giant Huawei has launched three new data storage solutions aimed at tackling the challenges experienced amid the rapid development of large artificial intelligence (AI) models.

The three innovative solutions, which will aid carriers in building data infrastructure in the AI era, include the AI data lake solution, all-scenario data protection solution and the Datacentre Virtualisation Solution (DCS) full-stack data centre solution.

“The rapid development of large AI models is unleashing the value of data assets and paving the way for an era of data awakening,” said Huawei information technology product line president Dr Peter Zhou during the Huawei Product and Solution Launch at the Mobile World Congress, held in Barcelona, Spain, from February 26 to 29.

However, two challenges emerge in data infrastructure construction in the AI era, he says, including the high requirements for data mobility as, to extract knowledge from data, independent and scattered data sources must be aggregated in AI data factories to mine value from the data.

Further, data assetisation is growing at a rapid pace, with the average retention time of annotated AI data and model data now at more than three years, and some valuable corpus data needs to be permanently stored.

The series of new innovative storage products and solutions aims to address these challenges as carriers build the required data infrastructure for the AI era.

The AI data lake solution for transferring mass data to valuable assets includes the Data Management Engine, a one-stop knowledge generation tool chain eDataMate, data fabric and the AI storage solutions OceanStor A800 and OceanStor A310.

“It makes AI training data globally visible, manageable and available, and improves data collection, preprocessing and training efficiency,” says Zhou.

“In particular, OceanStor A800, a next-generation high-performance network attached storage solution, is a robust AI storage power foundation with a data and control plane separation architecture, the OceanFS high-performance parallel file system, flexible bidirectional expansion and other capabilities, all designed to support real-time hypercluster scheduling.”

The all-scenario data protection solution, for data production, backup and archiving that boosts the resilience of data assets, uses two layers of collaborative deployment, the first of which is production-backup collaboration, backing massive numbers of small files up 90% faster than conventional solutions. It also supports real-time native-format data analytics and its post-deduplication tiering feature reduces bandwidth consumption by 80%.

Further, Huawei launched the OceanProtect E8000 and X9000 data backup appliance solutions and next-generation OceanStor Arctic magnetoelectric storage solution that is designed for warm and cold data.

The magnetoelectric storage solution is predicted to reduce total cost of ownership by 20% over tapes and power consumption by 90% over hard disk drives.

Huawei also unveiled the DCS full-stack data centre solution to help carriers achieve higher Internet technology service efficiency and agility.

This full-stack solution, built on virtualisation and containers, covers data collection, storage, computing, management and use, delivering comprehensive infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service.

Meanwhile, following the launch, Huawei revealed that it was named Customers' Choice in the 2024 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for Primary Storage.

Huawei OceanStor Storage was reviewed by 414 customers as of February 27 from various regions covering industries from a wide range of economic sectors, including telecommunications, manufacturing and services, besides others.

Huawei OceanStor Storage is used in over 150 countries and regions including Latin America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, where it provides reliable services to industries such as finance, telecommunications, government and public utilities.