Huawei releases scaly NAS. Rival's Isilon sales increase. Oh dear

Wannabe Isilon-beater Huawei is showing its scale-out NAS product, the OceanStor 9000, at CeBit, saying it's the first scale-out filer designed for six-layer 4K UHD program production and editing.

This system was announced in August 2013 at Interop in Las Vegas and has made, it appears, little progress since then.

On paper it looks great and Huawei claims the OceanStor 9000 enables "the management of the entire program production including reporting, editing, broadcasting, managing and storing, in a single storage system."

Huawei's website says it's a big data storage system using a symmetric distributed architecture giving large-scale horizontal expansion capabilities. It "consolidates data storage, archiving, and analysis capabilities."

Target applications are managing broadcast media, satellite mapping, genetic and other scientific research, energy exploration, and education.

Huawei OceanStor 9000

The system is made up of between three and 288 nodes and offers up to 40PB in a single namespace from its Wushan distributed filesystem. EMC's Isilon has a 50PB namespace limit. The OceanStor 9000 has three types of node:

• Insight node
• Capacity and mini-capacity nodes
• Performance node with 25 x 2.5inch bays

Access is across 1, 10 or 40GbitE.

An analysis subsystem can have between three and 32 nodes. There are two versions: one using the WushanSQL distributed database, storing both structured and unstructured data with access via 1 and 10GbitE, the other FusionInsight Hadoop, supporting Sqoop, MapReduce, HBase, and Hive and access over 10GbitE.

The performance nodes do motor as SPECsfs2008 NFS benchmarks attest;

• OceanStor 9000 - 20 nodes - 1,007,611 Ops/sec, 1.90ms ORT, 338,480 GB exported capacity
• OceanStor 9000 - 40 nodes - 2,016,450 Ops/sec, 1.86ms ORT, 676,960 GB exported capacity
• OceanStor 9000 - 100 nodes - 5,030,265 Ops/sec, 1.65ms ORT, 1,482,640 GB exported capacity

Some SPECsfs2008 NFS results

The 100-node configuration used 600 x 200GB SSDs and 2,500 hard disk drives. All the nodes were performance nodes.

Since it was announced, Isilon sales have increased and don't appear to have been impacted by the OceanStor 9000 at all. This is so even though Isilon says its clusters have performance up to 3.75 million file operations/sec; less than the OceanStor 9000's five million.

We may imagine that OceanStor 9000 sales are concentrated in China, with US sales depressed by the US government's anti-China sentiments. With Qumulo starting up to attack the scale-out NAS market, is the OceanStor 9000 ready for that stronger level of competition? ®