Thoughts and Practices on Localization of Storage

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As the national strategy for information security is gradually implemented, storage "localization" has become a goal pursued by domestic storage manufacturers. The first priority of storage localization is self-controllability, reliability and trustworthiness. This means that domestic storage manufacturers need to rely on their own research and development and design, fully master the core technology of the storage system, and achieve full control of the independent research and development, production, upgrade and maintenance of the storage system from hardware to software, and create a safe, reliable and reliable data storage platform. In other words, domestic storage manufacturers need to have their own storage media, chips, operating systems, storage management systems and other series of localized products.

However, localization of storage is by no means a closed-door process. Its purpose is to enable Chinese storage products to enter the world stage and become globally competitive. This requires domestic storage manufacturers to accurately grasp the technological and market trends of storage development, achieve overtaking and leapfrog development. The transformation of new technologies has brought new opportunities for the localization of storage software and hardware in China, making it possible to overtake.

Talking about the technology trend of storage development, from the perspective of storage media and equipment, NVMe SSD has gradually become the mainstream of technology. In the past year, NVMe SSD products have grown by 46%. Mainstream all-flash arrays have begun to shift to NVMe SSD, and server manufacturers have also accelerated their support for NVMe SSD. G2M pointed out that in 2016, 9 server companies launched a total of 23 product series, 39 versions supported NVMe SSD with U.2 interface. In 2017, 27 server product series supported NVMe SSD with U.2 interface. It is expected that by the end of 2019, 50% of enterprise-level SSDs will adopt the U.2 interface, that is, SSDs with SATA/SAS, M.2 and PCIe boards will share the remaining 50% of the market (NVMe SSD product types have increased by 46% in the past year). Secondly, StorageClass Memory will also become a technology trend in storage development. It may be more disruptive than flash memory and will change storage and application architectures - SCM can be addressed at the byte or block level and is persistent. It is conceivable that applications may choose to directly access SCM through memory mapping, which leads to an increasingly blurred boundary between memory and storage. In the future, there will be new changes in metadata management, caching, file systems, and other aspects.

From the perspective of storage systems, software-defined storage will show rapid growth. According to IDC forecasts, the compound annual growth rate of the global software-defined storage market will reach 13.5% from 2017 to 2021, and the revenue will be close to 16.2 billion US dollars in 2021. And NVMeoF will be an important driving force. Because the communication overhead is reduced, the performance of the system will be directly improved, making it possible to obtain scale up performance through scaleout. The development of artificial intelligence has caused more and more people to think about how to better schedule and predict resources through workload analysis, which reflects how to manage storage intelligently and reduce operation and maintenance expenses; how to analyze logs to help system administrators diagnose problems more quickly and provide solutions; how to analyze metadata to achieve tiered storage of storage systems and provide cost-effective storage solutions, etc.

Therefore, from hardware to software, storage is at a window of change. The development of localized storage will also usher in a new opportunity. "NVMe SSD/SCM", "distributed" and "intelligent" have become the keywords for the development of localized storage. And the result of all this is - an intelligent distributed flash memory system. At present, the distributed flash memory system will be manifested in two main structures:

Distributed flash storage built on shared storage:

Its structural characteristics are that storage and servers use the NVMe protocol and are interconnected through high-speed Ethernet. Its advantages are:

1) Storage and servers can be expanded independently

2) When developing storage management software, it can be assumed that the storage end has data protection, reducing the log overhead of the storage management software due to data consistency issues

3) After a single storage controller fails, no data recovery is required and system performance is relatively stable.

The second structure is a distributed flash memory structure based on servers. Its structural characteristics are that the server is directly connected to the NVMe disk, using the NVMe protocol and interconnected through high-speed Ethernet.

New media, new structure, new opportunities. Is China's current domestically produced ecosystem capable of achieving leapfrog development? The answer can be found in the current ecosystem of domestically produced storage.

In terms of storage media, Tsinghua Unigroup is currently developing flash memory particles, and Yangtze Memory's momentum is irreversible, and mass production should be realized in 2020. In terms of CPU, there are currently three major manufacturers in China: Shenwei, Loongson and Feiteng. Take Feiteng as an example. Based on the chip technology accumulated by the National University of Defense Technology, Feiteng has now become a world leader in the ARM circle. In October 2014, Feiteng successfully taped out the FT-1500A/16 CPU. After three years of development, it is now stable. In March this year, Feiteng successfully taped out the 64-core FT-2000+.

In terms of storage management systems, Tongyou insists on taking the path of independent and controllable research and development. Tongyou Technology established a national domestic business department in October 2012, and it took one year to complete the storage platform and develop the first unified storage product; in July 2014, it passed the compatibility certification of multiple domestic operating systems and databases and started the dual-control storage development project; in April 2015, it participated in the South Wind Project and won bids for multiple pilot projects; in July 2016, domestically produced independent and controllable storage was put into actual use, and domestically produced storage supports flash acceleration features to improve performance; in 2017, it launched in-depth cooperation with domestic flash companies and started the research and development of all-flash domestically produced independent and controllable storage products.

In addition, many friendly competitors have done a lot of localization work in networks, operating systems, servers, middleware, and application software.

Therefore, there is reason to believe that the entire domestic ecosystem is prepared and has the opportunity to achieve leapfrog development and realize domestic intelligent distributed flash memory in the future.

In order to meet this new opportunity and challenge, Tongyou Technology has developed a distributed all-flash storage system. The system is equipped with Memblaze U.2 flash drives, which can achieve intelligent data and workload management, perfectly support the OpenStack platform, fully adopt open frameworks, self-developed and open source software platforms, and is fully compatible with the Kylin operating system and can be ported to the Feiteng platform.

“The long road ahead is like a hard one, but we will start from the beginning again.” As a leader among domestic storage manufacturers, Tongyou Technology is working together with other domestic storage manufacturers to realize the localization of storage as soon as possible!

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