From the concept of data elements, to the inclusion of data assets in the agenda, to the "independent portal" of data infrastructure, a series of top-level designs around data have progressed layer by layer, which indicates that China is accelerating its transformation from a data country to a data power.
Of course, the road is not smooth, and there are quite a few "roadblocks" in between. Among them, the most important thing is data protection related to survival and development, and data backup is a decisive "plank".
Relevant statistics show that the proportion of data backup construction in China lags significantly behind that of developed countries. In Europe and the United States, about 60% of the entire data volume has been backed up, while the average proportion in the domestic market is only 22% - in key industries such as finance and **, the proportion of data backup is only respectively, and it is urgent to strengthen data protection.
The factors that contribute to this situation are complex, and the most important thing to reflect on is undoubtedly the technological evolution model of data backup. At present, the stacked architecture of "server + backup software" is quite popular, and backup software plays the role of "middleman" between the upper-layer application and the underlying infrastructure. In the fertile soil of the vigorous development of the digital economy and the main road of data communication, many backup software vendors have gradually formed the inertia of "making quick money" and the "small circle" of closed-door construction, the evolution of core technical capabilities is very slow, and the existing pattern of data backup in key industries such as finance dominated by foreign software vendors is also difficult to change.
All kinds of signs show that the era of backup software as an independent industry is coming to an end, and it will gradually become a part of the storage industry chain, and the dedicated backup storage architecture and software and hardware integration model led by advanced storage vendors will become popular. In the future, all-flash-based backup storage systems are expected to become an accelerator for various industries to promote data protection, and a new ecosystem of endogenous storage security will also grow healthily.
Dr. Zhou Yuefeng, Vice President and President of Huawei's Data Storage Product Line.
We can't wait"—Dr. Zhou Yuefeng, Vice President of Huawei and President of the Data Storage Product Line, expressed this sentiment several times at the recent OceanProtect data protection product launch conference. The urgency of time has given rise to a thunderous sense of action: Huawei has not only launched a new flagship all-flash backup appliance but also officially announced the open source of backup software, creating a new era of data backup development model from the dual pronged approach of core technology and business model.
"New wine in old bottles" cannot cope with the new challenges of data backup.
Freezing three feet, not a day's cold. In fact, the transformation of the data backup field is a natural outbreak after the long-term accumulation of many factors, and its evolution trajectory is inseparable from the profound changes in the industrial environment, and it is closely related to the urgency of real needs.
From a macro perspective, the digital economy is a new engine for economic growth in countries around the world, and how to minimize the damage caused by business downtime and data loss has become the primary issue. According to Gartner**, 75% of organizations will face one or more ransom attacks by 2025, and the average cost of recovering from an attack is $1.85 million, so it's important to build a systematic data protection strategy.
As the mainstay of data protection, data backup also faces new challenges of diversification. For example, data protection objects are changing dramatically, and various new applications put forward higher requirements for data backupThe scale of data has increased from petabytes to exabytes, and scenarios such as autonomous driving have made data backup difficultThe protection performance and security landscape are also evolving with the times, and the requirements for real-time risk control make traditional data backup methods difficult to handle.
In the face of increasingly severe challenges, the existing model of "server + backup software" has exposed shortcomings in backup and recovery efficiency, deployment costs, business resilience and other aspects, and there is a significant gap compared with the leading dedicated backup storage architecture. Take the ransomware attack scenario as an example: a professional backup storage architecture can achieve 999999% high reliability as well as 99 against ransomware9% recognition rate, while the reliability of "Server + Backup Software" is 9999% and struggle to deal with ransomware attacks.
It is worth noting that the development status of domestic independent data backup software also confirms that the "server + backup software" model has been struggling. In the past ten years, many domestic data backup software manufacturers have adopted the evolution path of "me too", although they have won the survival space in some application scenarios, they have been unable to break through in key industries such as finance, and it is difficult to assume the heavy responsibility of independent control, and may even mislead customers due to the "small profits".
Obviously, the gradual change of "new wine in old bottles" will not be able to break the current deadlock, and the field of data backup is expected to bring more disruptive evolution models and more open technology and industrial ecosystems. The storage manufacturers that have repeatedly stood in the C position have come to the stage again this time.
Storage intrinsic security opens up a new path for data backup.
For a long time, "application-backup software-storage" was the classic architecture in data backup – backup software captures data from higher-level applications and then stores it in the underlying mediaWhen recovering data, the backup software reads the data from the storage media and transfers it to the upper-layer application.
It is not difficult to see that in order to solve the pain points of the existing model, it is imperative to break the "three-tier architecture". Huawei pioneered the two-tier architecture of the application-data backup appliance to internalize backup software as an integral part of its storage products, comprehensively improving enterprise data protection capabilities and opening up a new path for endogenous storage security.
From the perspective of storage media evolution, the new two-layer architecture has strong underlying logic support. With the development of storage media from tape and optical disks to mechanical hard disks (HDDs) and then to flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs), backup software, which has played an important role in ecological application docking and data secondary combination, is facing a readjustment of its role positioning.
Li Yongjian, President of Huawei's Data Protection Domain.
Li Yongjian, President of Huawei's Data Protection Domain, said, "SSDs are naturally adapted to random reads and writes and have better performance for deduplication and compression. At this stage, the role of backup software will gradually fade." This is necessary for an all-flash-based data backup appliance to stand out, but it is not sufficient to replace traditional backup software.
More importantly, data protection, as a root technology, needs to continue to innovate in theory and algorithms, attract talents around the world to jointly develop advanced architectures and processes, and rely on the accumulation of a team of 1,000 people for more than 10 years to meet the needs of the digital transformation of thousands of industries. Independent backup software vendors are clearly unable to take on such a heavy responsibility - in recent years, they have rarely made breakthroughs in core technologies, and some companies are still in operational difficulties, and the development prospects are not optimistic.
Based on the above background, the burden of the all-round leap in data protection technology has historically fallen on storage manufacturers with stronger comprehensive strength and more prominent R&D capabilities. Leading companies represented by Huawei have made breakthroughs in key technologies such as large-scale deduplication and compression algorithms, high-performance, high-reliability, and secure data backup.
It is understood that Huawei's Oceanprotect X9000 all-flash performance backup appliance and OceanProtect E8000 all-flash distributed backup appliance have an industry-leading data reduction rate of 65%, and six layers of anti-ransomware protection enhance endogenous storage security. Among them, Oceanprotect X9000 can support 130 TB HR backup bandwidth and 72 TB HR recovery bandwidthOceanprotect E8000 provides 144PB of logical capacity on a single node, which can be flexibly scaled up to 4096 nodes.
From the "second ecology" of IT to the "second choice" of the world
Any disruptive innovation that breaks the existing pattern cannot be fought by a single force alone, and it is very important to build an open ecosystem with the participation of multiple subjects. Especially in the increasingly complex international environment, the IT ecology dominated by European and American giants should not become the "only one", and the world needs a "second choice".
In the field of data backup, Huawei will open source Open-eBackup to provide customers with a diverse ecosystem of software and hardware.
1. Open backup software user experience. Huawei will connect industry, academia, research and research through the open source community to achieve technology sharing, promote full communication between the industry and the demand side, and work with community members to formulate unified specifications for backup interfaces, and work with data protection standards organizations to promote the implementation of industry standards.
From the perspective of the overall development of the industry, Huawei's open-source backup software and sharing core storage technologies will help accelerate the comprehensive upgrade of data backup technology, talents, and standards, and form a positive feedback effect for the healthy growth of the industry. It is said that Huawei will work closely with storage vendors and software development partners to build a new backup storage ecosystem.
At present, Huawei has provided secure and reliable data protection services for more than 10,000 enterprises in more than 120 countries and regions around the world.
From a longer-term perspective, if the new data backup ecosystem goes well, Huawei will be one step closer to its strategic goal of "building a second choice for the world". Dr. Zhou Yuefeng said, "Huawei has a strong team in terms of computing power, storage capacity, and transportation capacity, which will help us to collaboratively build a full-stack solution to create a second plane, and we will also follow the principles of IT openness and standardization to carry out ecological cooperation." In the wilderness of the new digital world, there should be no single path to success – Huawei has set a new ecological benchmark and looks forward to more fellow travelers.