PARTNER FEATURE: In the 5G era, hundreds of billions of devices are connected, various HD, UHD videos, and IoT services are being used, and telcos’ data volumes are growing explosively. The transformation from pure network service providers to comprehensive ICT service providers has brought telcos the best opportunity to digitalize and build core competitiveness. Playing a core role in the digital transformation era, telcos have become a powerful engine for innovation and transformation.

Data-Driven Strategy for Telcos’ Digital Transformation

Facing business transformation in the internet and mobile era, telcos need to build a more agile IT infrastructure to quickly and dynamically provide various services, improve service development efficiency, and enhance flexibility to meet diverse data, voice, video, and new service requirements.

Cloud computing brings many changes to telcos’ service application requirements like agile deployment and diverse application types. Telcos must store a wide range of data at their data centers. Data stores span from emails to virtual machines and web servers, and the mixed workloads put a lot of pressure on storage environments.

Data-driven digital transformation for telcos is a consistent approach to the awareness, analytics, distribution, security, and monetization of data obtained from multiple sources. Digital success is largely dependent on how well data is leveraged, both for internal business optimization and external monetization.

Huawei OneStorage: Embracing the Digital Future

Data drives everything in the digital economy era. However, the digital world is filled with uncertainties, such as the uncertainty of storage workloads caused by diverse application types and the inaccurate prediction of storage capacity caused by ever-changing services. In addition, the evolution of multiple storage media and the development of cloud services also push the storage industry to move towards all-scenario convergence.

Huawei introduces the OneStorage solution to address these challenges with converged storage resource pools, intelligent data management, and open data services, enabling telcos to achieve all-scenario intelligence and multi-cloud convergence.

  • Converged resource pool: Siloed resources are converged to a storage pool, where storage resources are provisioned to applications based on service-level agreements (SLAs). It enables on-demand data allocation to meet various requirements, such as high bandwidth, low latency, and robust reliability, as well as further optimizing the total cost of ownership (TCO) for data storage.
  • Intelligent data management: OneStorage implements automatic SLAs of hot, warm, and cold data, flexible data mobility, and intelligent O&M. Data management and system O&M approaches are transformed from manual to automatic full lifecycle management (including planning, allocation, O&M, and optimization), greatly improving storage efficiency.
  • Open data services: Based on the unified software architecture and open APIs, OneStorage supports multi-cloud connection and convergence with flexible deployment models to strengthen enterprise-class storage capabilities.

Building Data-Centric Converged Storage to Propel Telcos’ Digital Transformation

Storage will no longer focus on physical devices in the future. Instead, a series of storage capabilities are abstracted into multiple SLA service templates. This translates business needs into underlying resource needs such as IOPS, latency, and bandwidth, to shield underlying storage differences and provide storage resources for external systems like BSS and OSS.

These capabilities ensure that business requirements are met, avoiding resource over-provisioning and over-investments, while also maximizing overall resource utilization. According to the statistics, the average storage space utilization is increased from 30% to 70%, and the TCO is reduced by more than 30%. In addition, service users can apply for storage resources in self-service mode and storage resources are automatically provisioned. The average provisioning time is also slashed from more than 6 hours to just 5 minutes, a 90% reduction.

The upcoming 5G era is full of opportunities and challenges, for which telcos proactively equip themselves with cutting-edge technologies. With a complete portfolio of products and solutions, Huawei storage will help telcos seize opportunities and tackle challenges by consolidating data and maximizing data value.