Asia Pacific (APAC) is set to be at the forefront of the digital economy. One in three companies in the region is expected to generate more than 30% of their revenues from digital products and services by 2023, according to research firm International Data Corp.
This rise of the digital economy, however, will introduce challenges to the supporting IT infrastructure, particularly around data storage. “In a digital economy, data applications will become more diversified, and increasing volumes of application data will be processed by the production systems. This means the need for reliable, performant, cost-effective data storage is more important than ever,” says Peter Zhou, president for Huawei IT product line.
Here are some ways APAC organisations can ensure their data storage capabilities can help them become digital and data-driven, according to the Striding Towards The Intelligent World white paper that Huawei launched last month.
Prepare for mass unstructured data
The volume of unstructured data – such as images, audio or video – is expected to grow as we progress to a digital economy. By 2025, 144 zettabytes of the data produced globally will be unstructured, and they will be widely used for day-to-day business operations and decision-making.
“When you key in a number to deposit or withdraw money at an ATM, that’s structured data. But in the case of the facial recognition payment method available in China today, the point-of-sale machine is analysing unstructured data, which is the customer’s face, to verify a payment,” explains Zhou.
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APAC organisations should therefore transform their structured data-centric teams into teams capable of designing, planning and managing mass unstructured data. To support that, they can use a professional distributed storage system to build a global unified data storage foundation centred on unstructured data. Ideally, the chosen distributed storage system should support hybrid workloads, multi-protocol interworking, data reduction, and high-density hardware to ensure sufficient capacity, data mobility, and premium usability.
Support diverse data apps and multi-cloud
As businesses digitally transform, they will use traditional databases as well as data applications like big data analytics, high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence. Zhou says an oil and gas company, for example, might be using real-time data analytics to monitor its operations, HPC to locate oilfields and Amazon S3 to store their data. The challenge here is that those data applications have different infrastructure requirements.
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Organisations are also increasingly putting their apps and data on multiple clouds to avoid vendor lock-in. However, this can lead to data silos that prevent their apps from being data-driven.
One way of overcoming these challenges is to ensure that the compute and storage resources are maintained flexibly and independently. Businesses that use a decoupled storage-compute architecture for emerging data applications will be able to improve reliability and cost-effectiveness. Additionally, they should adopt a centralised data sharing and storage IT architecture, and plan for a unified cross-cloud data management platform to maximise data sharing.
“Traditionally, an organisation might be engaging with at least two to three storage vendors, and they have multiple copies of their data sitting on various cloud platforms, which is not very efficient. This is why we designed our storage solutions to be compatible with different protocols. With just one storage system, our customer can pool all its data and support various data applications,” claims Zhou.
Help enhance data security and support sustainability
Storage should also act as the last line of defence against ransomware attacks, which are on the rise as ransomware is now commercially available. This calls for organisations to have comprehensive data security protection covering networks and storage.
They can implement anti-tampering and offline protection for data copies on production and backup storage, as well as retain a clean data copy for restoration. They should also select high-performance all-flash as the production and backup storage, as it can quickly recover services and reduce service downtime loss in the event of a ransomware attack.
Besides that, organisations need to ensure their storage can help them achieve their carbon-neutral goals. Storage devices are expected to be the main electricity-drawing IT components, consuming an average of 300 kilowatt-hours per year per 1 TB capacity in data centres.
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As APAC businesses will generate and use more data in the future, energy-efficient storage systems are crucial to ensure zero carbon emissions in data centres. “We’ve included advanced technologies in our storage solutions to ensure they are more efficient, which will help with energy savings and enable organisations to be more sustainable in the digital economy,” says Zhou.
A data-centric, trustworthy storage foundation
As we move into the digital and data-driven economy, APAC organisations must leverage professional storage solutions that can support various data applications effectively to remain competitive. Recognising this, organisations in Singapore -- regardless of size and industry -- are leveraging Huawei's storage solutions as the backbone of their digital banking, online shopping or even public services they offer to consumers. In short, Huawei's storage offerings are used everywhere in Singapore consumers' daily life.
One such solution is the Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage, which is being used by more than 40 of the world’s top 100 banks. For instance, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) in Macau migrated its mission-critical data from its legacy storage system to the OceanStor Dorado All-Flash storage. Consequently, the bank saw a ten-fold improvement in its app performance and ensured 24/7 uptime of its services. It also lowered its total cost of ownership by improving data storage utilisation by 80% and storage efficiency by 50%.
“Over the past three decades, data storage has become the foundation of high-value data and evolved with the growth of data applications. As we usher in the data era, Huawei data storage is committed to building a data-centric, trustworthy storage foundation for diverse applications to unleash the power of data-driven productivity,” concludes Zhou.
