Huawei FusionServer RH8100 adds another option to the mission-critical server market

With the transformation from "Made in China" to "Created in China", localization has ushered in the spring breeze of reform. In the server field, domestic server manufacturers have already had a comparable share of IBM, HP, Dell and other manufacturers in terms of overall shipments, and are showing a trend of catching up. Chinese manufacturers represented by Huawei, Inspur and Sugon have seized the opportunity of localization and have been seeking technological breakthroughs. They are all building their own core competitiveness, focusing on product innovation and the research and development of core technologies, in order to gain the initiative in market competition.

But it is a bit regrettable that, judging from past performance, domestic servers first conquered the low- and mid-end X86 server market. In the high-end server market, domestic manufacturers still have a long way to go.

Are high-end servers a “forbidden area” in China?

Speaking of high-end servers, they carry the company's key applications. The characteristics of such applications are first of all extremely high transaction processing capabilities. For example, the bank's settlement system has to process hundreds of thousands of transactions every day. Secondly, the business cannot be interrupted. Unexpected downtime will have serious consequences. Many industries have put forward clear requirements for the continuous operation time of key application hosts.

As we all know, the mission-critical server market has always been dominated by minicomputers. Compared with minicomputers, the cost-effectiveness of x86 servers and their flexibility in building cloud computing systems have long been recognized by users. Once x86 servers break through the limitations of reliability and stability, they will inevitably quickly break through the fortress built by minicomputers in the high-end market.

As one of the cores of modern information, are high-end servers really a "forbidden area" for Chinese servers? In May this year, at the Intel Xeon E7 v3 product launch conference themed "Core Start Key Intelligence to Win the Opportunity", Huawei demonstrated its eight-way rack server FusionServer RH8100 V3 equipped with Xeon E7 v3 processors and once again refreshed the SPEC floating-point computing performance record, strongly refuting this doubt.

It is understood that Huawei's FusionServer RH8100 V3 server has 60 RAS features comparable to minicomputers. By adopting leading architecture design, it can provide excellent computing performance and expansion capabilities, while ensuring the continuous and stable operation of the equipment, meeting the requirements of various stringent computing environments, and is the first to pass the certification of SAP HANA all-in-one E7 v3 processors. FusionServer RH8100 V3 supports 8 E7-8800 v2 or E7-8800 v3 processors, providing a maximum of 144 computing cores and supporting 12TB DDR3 or DDR4 memory expansion.

Creating differentiated products and challenging engineering limits

Servers are standard equipment and the technology is mature, so it is difficult to differentiate. Huawei's R&D team relies on its accumulation and concerted collaboration in the "hardware, thermal design, and software fields" to challenge the limits of engineering and finely control every detail, such as hardware layout, system air duct design, fan selection, precise air guide design, radiator design, speed regulation strategy, etc., so that Huawei servers can run uninterruptedly at a high temperature of 40 degrees. Even if the air conditioner is damaged due to the high temperature in the computer room, it can still continue to operate to achieve business continuity.

In addition, the fault warning, maintenance without unpacking, and management "black box" functions of FusionServer RH8100 V3 can also improve the efficiency of equipment maintenance and significantly reduce the unavailability time of equipment. These changes mean that Huawei FusionServer RH8100 V3 has greatly improved the system availability of x86 servers.

In order to improve the quality of components and ensure product reliability, Huawei has been focusing on component quality since last year's supplier conference, and all suppliers are also focusing on component quality to ensure the supply of Huawei servers. Huawei believes that the current labor cost in the market, including China, is very high. If there are many product quality problems, the maintenance cost will be much higher than the product price. For example, it costs $1,000 for a partner in Europe to help users repair or replace a hard drive, while the price of a server is only two or three thousand dollars. Therefore, Huawei must emphasize the quality of its products.

Qiu Long, the head of Huawei's server business, once said, "In terms of quality, Huawei has developed corresponding processes, testing and certification methods for servers, including CPUs, hard disks, and memory. In the end, we can see that the failure rate of Huawei's server products is much lower than that of its competitors. This is because Huawei eliminates many faults before the server products are shipped."

It is not difficult to see that Huawei FusionServer RH8100 V3's outstanding performance in RAS features has made it possible for x86 to break through the RISC defense line. In the mission-critical server market, users now have another truly optional choice.