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Today's enterprises need to develop IT systems based on multiple public and private clouds underpinned by reliable data storage infrastructure.
By Peter Zhou, President, IT Product Line, Huawei
The evolution of civilization has always gone hand in hand with recording and spreading information. From tying knots in strings to bone script, from paper to hard disks and flash memory, the methods of recording information have seen enormous leaps throughout history.
Today, civilization uses digital storage to retain data. The data storage industry has been evolving alongside the development of data applications. Early on, databases were simply data applications, and the earliest IBM mainframes primarily ran database systems. Redundant arrays of independent disks (RAID) technology connects disks together as disk arrays, and it was with this technology that EMC launched the world's first specialized storage device in 1991. This device marked the upgrade of mainframe architecture from separated computing and storage to integrated computing and storage, and was the origin of the storage area network (SAN) architecture.
Around the year 2000, the emergence of the Internet paved the way for network-attached storage (NAS), making highly reliable storage and the efficient sharing of document data possible. Then, around 2010, the emergence of cloud computing represented by virtual machines led to the popularization of unified storage that integrates SAN and NAS. In 2015, all-flash storage started replacing hard disk drive (HDD) storage at scale, delivering advantages in performance, reliability, and energy efficiency. Moreover, emerging applications based on massive amounts of unstructured data, such as video, big data, and AI, gave rise to scalable distributed storage.