The Data Age

With the exponential growth and adoption of technologies during the digital age, the emergence of new ways of communicating and, in particular, with the emergence of high-speed networks, we began to generate large volumes of information (Big Data), to circulate it and use it as a key element in decision making.

At Milestone, we know that there’s no point in having such an important asset if it isn’t useful. Companies are increasingly adopting smart tools capable of processing these massive volumes of information, tools which vary both in terms of processing techniques and in access speed.

These tools are powered by BI (Business Intelligence) and BDA (Big Data Analytics) technologies and are used to help us understand this data and even make predictions, which is increasingly important for managers when it comes to implementing development strategies for their businesses, based, for instance, on behaviours, preferences, cycles and trends, among other variables that can be evaluated.

This huge amount of information (data) has become one of the greatest assets of companies and, when used right, can offer a significant competitive advantage, as it allows them to evaluate and drive new opportunities for innovation, create new products and services offerings tailored to the industries in which the companies operate and to their respective target audiences.

Given the exponential growth in the volume of data generated by businesses, Milestone has identified a new concern for its customers related to access, storage and protection of that data.

Information has always been stored on different media, with greater or lesser capacity regarding the volume of data to be stored and the place of storage.

None of this, of course, is news, except for the fact that the volume of information has grown exponentially, as has its criticality (companies are increasingly aware that “information is power”) and the need for quick access to it is vital.

While Milestone’s expertise in information processing and analysis is already well established and recognised in the market, we nevertheless decided to scour the market for information storage solutions that would enable us to offer our current and potential customers global solutions that would guarantee a response to the various challenges they face.

Following assessment of the value propositions of the various manufacturers in our market and of their ability to adapt to the different scenarios, we ultimately adopted solutions driven by Huawei technology, namely their OceanStor Dorado storage systems.

We opted for these solutions based on their potential, given their versatility as regards storage media, supporting both traditional HDD and also SSD, the latter offering much higher storage capacities, lower consumption and latencies and, above all, much higher access speeds.

While mixed solutions using both types of storage media are possible, the greatest advantage is the ability to have fully All-Flash solutions, amongst which Huawei OceanStor Dorado solutions stand out from others available on the market, offering:

reduced latency (5x faster than the industry average);
high performance (2x more IOPS than the competition);
high fault tolerance (100% load balancing between controllers);
fast data reconstruction process (e.g: 7.1 TB in less than 6 minutes);
alternative storage switch (in case of power failure, with the active-active HyperMetro solution);
automatic controller updates;
full-mesh architecture;
High-density enclosures;
five-layer data protection;
00000% availability;
prediction of up to 12 months of future storage needs;
low TCO compared to hybrid solutions, among other differentiating features.

For example, the OceanStor Dorado V3 All-Flash storage solution, which features:

NVMe architecture, SAS, SSDs and Huawei FlashLink® intelligent algorithms;
delivers 0.3 ms latency, tripling application performance;
supports up to 16 controllers and 7,000,565 SPC-1 IOPS^TM;
supports comprehensive SAN and NA features;
active-active HyperMetro gateway-free solution, which can easily be upgraded to 3DC or a Converged Data Management (CDM) solution to achieve 99.9999% availability.
inline deduplication and compression technologies provide a data reduction ratio of up to 5:1 and can lead to 75% in OPEX savings.

Source: https://e.huawei.com/br/products/storage/unified-storage/dorado-v3

With these solutions we can ensure fast data access (without which storing large volumes of data would be pointless), large storage capacity, failure tolerance, and high availability, in addition to different types of architecture, taking into account backup sites (HA), geographically dispersed solutions, and even solutions implementing DR (disaster recovery) policies.

To ensure the quality of the services we provide, be they design and conception, implementation and configuration or subsequent support, we underwent a long period of resource certification, obtaining more than 20 certifications that enabled us to achieve Huawei Certified Service Partner (CSP) status (level 4-Stars), which is obtained following a long accreditation process and serves as a seal of approval from the manufacturer attesting to our ability to design, implement and support their technology solutions. This allows us to ensure the quality of the solutions designed to meet the challenges identified and thus ensure successful projects, with Milestone at the disposal of those who need support in the evaluation of storage and data management solutions.