H3C Releases the New Generation Storage System Primera for Key Services

On August 8, H3C officially unveiled its new generation smart storage system Primera for guaranteeing key services on the release conference themed "Born Intelligent and Securing Future" in Tianjin.

The new Primera storage system not only achieves a qualitative change in storage media from HDD to SSD, but also achieves an unprecedented 100% SLA. By innovating the storage protocols, interconnecting architecture, controllers, OS, and application layer, Primera delivers upgraded performance, experience, and perception, making it a masterpiece in core storage products in the new era.

Vice president and director of computing and storage product line of H3C, Chen Zhenkuan said, "H3C proposed the Digital Brain Project on the 2019 Navigate summit. This initiative aims to comprehensively establish an intelligent digital platform as the core for digital transformation. To achieve that goal, the IT infrastructure must be intelligent first. 'Intelligent IT infrastructure' means that intelligent management is integrated to the entire IT infrastructure architecture and continuous product updates can make the architecture endogenously intelligent. New hardware products represented by Primera will be strong support at the digital infrastructure layer for H3C's Digital Brain Project." The name Primera of H3C's intelligent storage system for key services derives from novel technologies and architectures applied to the software and hardware design.

H3C’s intelligent storage system for key services: Primera

Primera is equipped with brand new kernels:

122% Performance Increased

In terms of storage media selection, Primera turns to the flash media SSD featuring high performance. Accordingly, it replaces the storage protocol SAS with NVMe that delivers shorter latency.

In addition, the application of a new controller and an interconnection architecture to Primera allowslinear growth of the I/O performance with the node increase, meeting high requirements on storage performance including the database from enterprise key services. The upgraded storage media and overall system architecture allows Primera to bring 122% performance increase.

100% System Usability

Primera provides both vertical and horizontal non-stop upgrade schemes to satisfy site requirements of different users. Meanwhile, At the same time, with the new generation of fully interconnected architecture controllers, as long as any one of the nodes is still online, the entire storage system will not be interrupted.

Advanced and mature AI technologies are introduced to manage data and applications in Primera. In this way,Primera perceives the running status of physical devices as well as the status of components above storage, such as network, servers, and VMs. This helps reduce the probability of the overall IT system experiencing storage faults and guarantees 100% system usability.

93% Deployment Time Reduced

Based on the comprehensively evolved hardware, Primera re-builds the storage software functions. Specifically, the previous interconnected and associated storage functions are now separated as independent data services. In this way, upgrade and maintenance operations can be performed without restarting the system, self-maintenance and self-management of higher degree are possible, andthe actual costs and TCO on core storage can be reduced for customers.

In addition, Primera can automatically determine whether to store data in private cloud or public cloud based on user habits, application policies, and service status, striking a balance among flexibility, cost, and efficiency. After tests, the new generation Primera proves to be able to save 93% time taken by users in upgrade deployment, management, and upgrade procedure.

Intelligent Storage Ushering in a New Era

Technological and architecture innovations make Primera take the lead of intelligent flash storage, further enhance H3C's digital infrastructure, and function as engines for H3C to drive digital transformation for hundreds of industries.