If it is not broken, it will not stand, and it will stand after it is broken.
Today's China is accelerating from a data power to a data power, and the vigorous development of the digital economy and data industry is triggering a large number of new data backup and data security challenges on the demand sideIn the field of data backup, which is one of the supply sides, the development of technology, products, scenarios, and ecology is relatively slow, making the contradiction between demand and supply increasingly prominent.
At this moment, China's data backup industry chooses to compete with the tide and rise to the challenge, or go with the flow and get by?As Dr. Zhou Yuefeng, Vice President and President of Huawei's Data Storage Product Line, said, "Today, China's data backup industry is becoming complacent, and it has gradually become a shortcoming of the entire data storage industry. Industry colleagues need to unite to break this state and make the data backup industry develop rapidly by sharing technology and building an ecosystem. ”
At the end of the year, Huawei Data Storage took the lead in releasing the OceanProtect X9000 and OceanProtect E8000 all-flash backup all-in-one machines, and launched the Open-eBackup software open-source program to share the key technologies it has accumulated over the years in the field of data backup, hoping to stimulate the innovation vitality of China's data backup industry with the first goose effect.
Dr. Zhou Yuefeng, Vice President and President of Huawei's Data Storage Product Line.
Preparedness is the best way to avoid trouble.
In the era of digital economy, data has become the most important factor of production, which has also made the importance of data backup increasingly prominent. However, with the deepening of industrial digitalization and enterprise digital transformation, a large number of new technologies, new scenarios, and new applications have emerged, and data protection objects, application environments, and security situations have undergone great changes.
For example, the in-depth application of big data and AI technologies has enabled the amount of data backup to quickly move to the exabyte levelThe ransomware pandemic continues to increase the complexity of data protection ......All of this makes traditional backup a significant shortcoming in the data storage industry.
The core reasons for this are weak backup awareness, backward backup architecture, and closed ecosystem.
First of all, the awareness of data backup and data protection among users in many industries in China is still relatively weak and needs to be further improved. According to the data of China's data disaster recovery industry, the proportion of backup construction in China is only 22%, which is far lower than that of developed countries in Europe and the United StatesThe proportion of production data protected in key industries such as finance and ** is still very low.
Second, China's mainstream backup architecture is backward. In the world, the PBBA (backup appliance) market is growing rapidly, and the backup appliance has long been the mainstream architecture product. In the Chinese market, the backup software + server stacking architecture still occupies the majority, and the backup software plays the role of a "middleman" between the upper-layer application and the underlying infrastructure, which has gradually become a technical bottleneck. In addition, many domestic backup software manufacturers are closed to construction, the development of core technologies is slow, and the key technologies of backup software are still in the hands of foreign manufacturers. Taking the financial industry as an example, most financial institutions are still using foreign backup software, and with the growth of data volume, this model is becoming more and more difficult to meet the needs of industry users in terms of performance, capacity, reliability and even cost performance.
Third, the development of China's data backup ecosystem is relatively closed, and many domestic backup software vendors currently only focus on a few simple ecological scenarios. As we all know, data backup is essentially a field of ecological docking, and ecology is crucial to industrial development. With the emergence of new scenarios and new applications, there is a strong demand for data backup to support all scenarios, and it is inevitable that data backup will be fully open.
Today, China's data backup industry is more aimed at quick wins and lacks core technologies. Once it enters a state of restlessness, it is not only difficult for users to choose data backup-related products and solutions independently, but also makes it easier for industrial innovation to stagnate. Dr. Zhou Yuefeng said.
IDC**, China is expected to become the world's largest datasphere by 2025. There is no doubt that China's data backup industry has extremely broad market prospects. Big Data believes that the solution of various cruxes of the current industry is, first, the need to take competitive backup all-in-one products as the starting point to accelerate the elimination of traditional backup architecture in the market;Second, it is necessary for leading enterprises to stand up, break the inherent closed ecology, reshape the program, ecology and even talent training in an all-round way, and build an open and benign industrial ecology.
Now, Huawei's data storage has taken action.
In the flash era, backup architectures are changing subtly.
In the past, the three-tier stack architecture of "backup software + network + server" used backup software to store data from the application to the underlying media through the network, and read the data from the media layer through the backup software during recovery. Backup software is at the heart of the architecture, but it's also the bottleneck. In particular, with the development of applications, the demand for high-performance and large-capacity data backup continues to increase, and the traditional model with backup software as the core is easy to encounter various challenges.
How to break down the barriers of traditional architectures and promote the simplification of backup architectures?At present, the development and popularization of large-capacity flash memory technology has indeed opened up a new way for the change of backup architecture at the technical level. More importantly, flash memory has good performance performance and good random read/write, deduplication and compression performance, which helps to sink many functions of backup software into the backup device, thereby simplifying the entire backup architecture.
The development of flash memory technology has undoubtedly made endogenous backup software based on backup storage more competitive. The all-flash backup appliance can separate the control plane and data processing plane of data backup, and completely sink data processing such as deduplication and compression to the backup device, greatly improving the performance of backup and recovery. Li Yongjian, President of Huawei's Data Protection Domain, said, "It can be said that independent backup software is going to die. ”
Market data doesn't lie. According to IDC's "2023 First Half China Enterprise Storage Market Tracker", the backup appliance (PBBA) market was driven by **, financial and other industries, with a year-on-year increase of 378%, the market demand far exceeds other types of storage products.
Like other world-class storage vendors, Huawei is also a supporter of all-flash backup appliances, and has comprehensive capabilities in flash native architecture design, data reduction algorithms, and backup software, which helps build all-flash all-in-one products from the perspective of full-stack software and hardware.
Taking the Oceanprotect X9000 All-Flash Performance Backup Appliance and OceanProtect E8000 All-Flash Distributed Backup Appliance as examples, the two products have an industry-leading data reduction rate of 65% and support six layers of anti-ransomware protection to enhance endogenous storage security. Among them, Oceanprotect X9000 ranks first in the industry in many performance indicators such as 130TB HR backup bandwidth and 72TB HR recovery bandwidthOceanprotect E8000 provides 144PB of logical capacity for a single node, and the scale-out course enables the deduplication backup performance to reach 45TB and the recovery performance to reach 225TB and can be flexibly scaled up to 4096 nodes.
Huawei's all-flash backup appliance uses the Share Nothing architecture, which is world-class in terms of performance, power consumption, security, reliability, and scalability. Dr. Zhou Yuefeng introduced.
In fact, the benign development of an industry, in addition to competitive products, ecological construction cannot be absent. Therefore, Huawei hopes to open source backup software to accelerate the entire data backup industry.
In China's current data backup market, most backup software tends to adopt a closed-source model, and focuses on subdivided scenarios to build a small ecosystem, and technological innovation, product architecture, and solutions are prone to stagnation. In the long run, it will do more harm than good to users.
How to solve this crux of the problem?Open source is the way to go. Compared with the closed-source model, the open-source model can not only reduce the innovation entry threshold of industry participants, stimulate the vitality of technological innovation, and bring about a significant improvement in innovation efficiency and quality, but also help build an open, efficient, and talent-rich industrial development pattern.
From the perspective of the urgent needs of China's digital economy and the rapid development of the digital industry, it has become an inevitable trend for data backup to establish a new ecosystem with the help of open source models. To this end, Huawei has launched an open-source backup software program called open-ebackup, which features full data protection features, simplified use, and open interfaces, so that developers and partners can quickly integrate and obtain various data backup capabilities.
It is reported that open-ebackup has launched a solicitation for developers and partners across the country. On April 30 next year, Huawei will release the open-ebackup community version and the beta version to the openeluer communityOn June 30, the first free community version was officially released.
Big Data** believes that the excellent product power of all-flash backup all-in-one machine is like building a thick and reliable ecological soil for the entire data backup product, and the open source model of backup software based on this will bring the seeds of innovation, which will create an open technical ecology for data backup, and the data backup field will grow to the sun and grow into a prosperous forest.
Huawei supports other developers and partners to build their own backup software based on Open-eBackup, and welcomes other storage vendors to integrate Open-Ebackup into their storage devices. Huawei alone is not enough for China's data storage industry, and we hope that the industry will work together to make up for its shortcomings, become bigger and stronger, and provide customers with more and better choices, so as to help China move from a data power to a data power. Dr. Zhou Yuefeng finally said.