SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 27, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, recently announced that its cloud storage system has been successfully deployed at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), providing a petabyte-level data storage, archiving, and sharing platform for the Hyades system, the primary on-campus supercomputer of UCSC, which is dedicated to computational astrophysics research.

With exponential growth of data resulting from increasingly intensified research programs, the data storage system of the astrophysics research became challenged by the changing requirements for scalability, read/write performance, reliability, and increase in deployment costs. The researchers have been in urgent need of a new storage system and solution that is not only able to cope with current issues but is also prepared for the more complex and stringent research requirements in the foreseeable future.

Computing cluster administrator Shawfeng Dong (foreground) oversaw the installation and integration of the Hyades supercomputer and Huawei storage system. Photo credit: C. Lagattuta

Since April 2013, Huawei has been providing its high-performance one petabyte Universal Distributed Storage (UDS) system to pair with the Hyades supercomputer system. After three months of tests performed by Hyades system engineers, the UDS system was proven to provide powerful scalability and superb performance in large-scale data storage scenarios.

Huawei's UDS cloud storage system employs the unique Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) architecture, which enables flexible capacity expansion from petabyte to exabyte as well as a 4.2 W/TB ultralow power consumption. In addition to attractive features such as 2.1 PB per cabinet high-density design and Zero Touch, the UDS system also features multiple data center management, allowing for secure and reliable cross-regional data movement in a unified resource pool, enabling UCSC astrophysicists to better collaborate with affiliated research centers across the United States.

"Hyades features over ten times improvement in performance than its predecessor," said Mr. Piero Madau, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, UCSC cum Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. "With the Huawei system providing storage for our simulation results, we can maximize the value of those results by making them available to the astrophysics community."

Huawei's storage business experienced significant growth in 2012, with rapid increases in sales revenue in both domestic and overseas enterprise markets. Since 2013, Huawei's storage product business adopted the philosophy of "Intelligence on Demand, Convergence for Future", directly addressing unpredicted storage requirements brought by explosive data growth, as well as the urgency to improve data management efficiency. In particular, Huawei's flagship UDS cloud storage system has been deployed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and since then, has been highly sought after by a number of research institutes and carrier operators across the world.