The rise of mobile Internet has seen traditional services like voice decline, which has in turn affected operators' revenues because they rely on such services. Operators must therefore think out of box to increase revenue and reduce expenditure.
They need to develop new services, understand customers, and provide excellent digital services. They must abandon traditional voice-based revenue models, and transform IT systems from costs centers into profit centers.
Reducing expenditure needs new technology that allows operators to consolidate or renovate internal IT resources, lower OPEX, and sustain growth.
Consolidate to accumulate
Many issues affect operators' storage systems, requiring them to consolidate storage to improve resource utilization and reduce costs.
Consolidating or renovating existing support systems is the best way to drive up revenue. For example, the data center consolidation programs of the US and Australian governments will help them save US$5 billion and US$1 billion respectively. Carrier CIOs require sustainable development by consolidating data centers and, as part of that, storage.
Operators' IT support systems, which support billing, sales, pricing, network management, and other core services, have traditionally been siloed, because each system uses an exclusive set of IT system resources. This has led to data silo issues, where different support systems are unable to share resources and support systems are constructed based on the highest computing and storage demands. As a result, the average utilization of system storage resources is less than 50 percent, with some not even hitting 30 percent. Low storage resource utilization directly causes high service costs.
Meanwhile, the coexistence of multiple heterogeneous storage devices requires different management platforms, complicating management and raising OPEX.
The cost of maintenance and spare parts for most equipment is very high, keeping OPEX high. Old storage devices with shaky storage performance and capacity cannot support some services or be expanded.
What does Huawei have in store?
Operators' main operational support systems are BSS, OSS, and VAS. BSS comprises customer relationship management (CRM), billing, and business intelligence (BI) systems.
These core service systems are very demanding on service response and service continuity, and even more so on storage performance and availability. For instance, the CRM system database service is entirely RAM-based, so pressure on the OLTP service is very high, as are performance requirements. At the million user level, 50,000+ IOPS may be needed.
Operators also need low I/O latency. China Mobile, for instance, requires query result returns in less than three seconds and storage latency of no more than 20 ms. Availability requirements must preclude data loss, and RPO for disaster recovery must be zero.
With strong expertise in BSS, OSS, and VAS systems and a keen understanding of the IT system issues operators face, Huawei continues to introduce innovative storage products and solutions in this area.
The OceanStor converged storage solution is the cornerstone of Huawei's storage consolidation solutions for telecom services. The solution offers post-warranty equipment replacement, storage centralization, and virtualization consolidation. It also uses existing equipment, helping operators implement cross-service and cross-device data flow, eliminate data silos, improve resource utilization, and reduce OPEX. Based on the lifecycle of telecom service data, the solution delivers cost- and performance-optimized data storage solutions.
Features and benefits
OceanStor solves problems with storage equipment that’s near the end of its warranty and thus cheaper to replace than repair. Out-of-warranty storage can also cause bottlenecks in performance and capacity, leaving operators unable to expand capacity to support service growth.
OceanStor offers mid-range (OceanStor 18000 V3) and high-end (OceanStor V3) replacements for old storage products in a one-to-one or one-to-many configuration. The former is suitable for supporting large-scale services, and the latter medium-scale.
The two OceanStor devices offer two to ten times the performance of other leading products, plus the reliability of fully redundant architecture. Their performance and capacity can be increased linearly, and the two eliminate storage performance and capacity bottlenecks, boost service processing efficiency, ensure stable core services with multi-controller redundancy architecture, and reduce TCO by over 30 percent.
OceanStor also solves the siloed deployment of storage systems, a problem many operators face in their current networks. The storage systems of network services can be replaced using a one-to-many solution that enables storage centralization, eliminates siloed service data, permits data sharing, and facilitates big data-assisted analysis and decision making. Centralization improves storage resource utilization by 70 percent.
Imbued with Huawei's broad knowledge of operator service loads, OceanStor integrates different service features and coordinates with other powerful solutions, such as Huawei's tiered storage, QoS, and cache partition, to protect critical services. In addition, OceanStor cuts investment by adjusting and allocating storage resources based on dynamic changes in data value to classify and manage data. Centralization forms storage resource pools that can be added online, and new services can go online without creating a new system, greatly shortening service TTM.
Huawei also offers powerful solutions when existing storage is still within warranty but problems exist with performance, capacity constraints, and multi-vendor products.
Huawei Data Storage Systems (HDSS) features leading heterogeneous virtualization technology for taking over third-party storage without gateways, making networking easier and less costly.
OceanStor 18000 V3 and OceanStor V3 integrate heterogeneous storage from different manufacturers on current networks into virtualized resource pools to control these devices.
HDSS products enable data migration and storage management. They apply stable architecture and leading product tech to virtualize third-party storage on current networks, and create virtualized resource pools for unified management and operations. Customers' initial investment is protected because performance and capacity bottlenecks are resolved and TCO and management difficulties are reduced.
Storage consolidation requires leading product technology and the support of a data migration service guarantee. As a leading storage vendor, Huawei provides high-quality and efficient data migration services for customers, including online and offline migration solutions depending on service downtime requirements.
Huawei's converged storage products are compatible with over 100 types of equipment from mainstream storage vendors, and can access their virtual gateways. In addition, Huawei has extensive experience in data migration, having managed the critical service migration projects of over 50 operators globally, including high-end storage products from vendors like EMC, IBM, HDS, HP, and Sun.
Notably, HDSS heterogeneous virtualization performs migration twice as quickly as traditional gateway methods. In two-node cluster single array system scenarios, the migration time is less than three hours, 50 percent lower than that of competitors'. This meets operators' core demands for data migration with reduced or zero interruption of critical services and minimal interruption of non-critical services.
Keeping growth sustainable
HDSS keeps pace with the latest development trends in storage technology, with Huawei regularly releasing new products to meet operators' needs.
Huawei's storage consolidation solutions consolidate operators' current storage resources, enabling cross-device and cross-system data flow and data sharing for big data mining. Consolidation simplifies storage management, helping customers reduce management, operations, and expansion costs; accelerate service TTM; and achieve sustainable business growth.
Huawei assisted VIVACOM, Bulgaria's largest operator, to consolidate its storage. The scheme involved replacing storage systems on VIVACOM's current network, and integrating its core billing system using Huawei's high-end storage equipment, which boasts three times the performance of the legacy equipment.
Data migration involved six kinds of operating systems, two core services, and more than 50 key services, with different migration tools used for different services. Core services suffered zero interruption, and non-core services less than eight hours.
Ultimately, Huawei helped VIVACOM resolve storage performance bottlenecks and increase billing information processing efficiency by 300 percent.
