What is the STaaS solution?

Hello all,

This post introduces the background and architecture of the STaaS solution.

With the development of the mobile Internet, Internet of Things, and Internet of everything, data amount has been increasing exponentially. Users face the following challenges in data storage, optimization, use, and management of traditional data centers:

• Heterogeneous storage devices are purchased in several batches during data center construction, diversifying storage resources.

• The quantities and types of storage devices increase, increasing the complexity in storage resource management.

• Storage resources on different devices gradually form heterogeneous islands among which data cannot flow. Storage capacity fragments increase. Planning and allocating storage space become increasingly difficult.

• The rollout of medium- and large-sized data services involves service planning as well as procurement, configuration, and provisioning of storage resources. The rollout usually takes several months.

• Capacity expansion, reconstruction, and service provisioning across heterogeneous devices are difficult due to vendor lock-in.

• Data centers face problems related to resource consolidation and quick provisioning and cannot be transformed to cloud data centers.

Huawei's STaaS solution consolidates resources from traditional enterprise storage, and private clouds, delivering storage services for upper-layer applications as services. Customers do not need to focus on complex storage details any more but transparently use storage resources through storage interfaces. This enables customers to use storage resources based on the service catalog and resource pool rather than each storage device. The STaaS solution implements servitization and intelligentization for management and usage of storage resources.

The STaaS solution architecture is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 STaaS solution architecture

• Infrastructure: Includes OceanStor T series storage, OceanStor V3 series storage, OceanStor V5 series storage, OceanStor Dorado V3 series all-flash storage, FusionStorage (distributed storage), OceanStor 9000 distributed storage, and third-party storage devices.

• Service provisioning and management: OceanStor DJ is the provisioning node and eSight is the O&M management node. Service provisioning involves storage service level definition, service catalog definition, automatic service delivery, and cloud platform integration. eSight centrally manages servers, storage devices, and switches. eSight enables visualized fault diagnosis, and intelligent capacity analysis. With these functions, eSight effectively helps enterprises improve O&M efficiency and resource usage at lower O&M costs, ensuring reliable operations of ICT systems.

• Upper-layer applications: Interconnects with the VMware and Odin cloud platforms.

Figure 2 shows the typical network topology.

Figure 2 Typical network topology of STaaS

Table 1 shows the deployment requirements for STaaS.

Table 1 STaaS deployment requirements

Thanks.