<h2>I. The End of Hardware Dividends and the &#34;Super Cycle&#34; of Storage Price Increases</h2>
<p>As the clock strikes 2025, global IT decision-makers are not greeted with the expected cost relief but are instead pushed into an unprecedented &#34;super inflation cycle.&#34;</p>
<p>According to data disclosed by Tom's Hardware, the contract price of DRAM in 2025 has increased by as much as 171.8% year-on-year, setting a historical high. In the SSD sector, the situation is even more &#34;grim&#34;: Cameron Crandall, the data center SSD business manager at Kingston, revealed that since the first quarter of 2025, the cumulative price increase of NAND Flash has reached 246%. Since NAND Flash accounts for 90% of SSD production costs, manufacturers can no longer absorb the premium and have to pass it all on to downstream companies.</p>
<p>In this unprecedented storage price increase cycle triggered by the siphoning effect of AI demand, companies that still adhere to self-built data centers or small to medium-sized IDC hosting are facing unprecedented survival pressure.</p>
<h2>II. The &#34;Invisible Tax&#34; of Traditional IT and the CAPEX Black Hole</h2>
<p>For technology managers, hardware procurement is no longer an asset investment but a gamble of &#34;high-stakes takeover.&#34;</p>
<h2>Supply Chain Long-Term Agreements and the Predicament of Small and Medium Enterprises</h2>
<p>When the global supply chain tightens, computing resources preferentially tilt towards leading giants. Long-term agreements (LTA) in the supply chain are locked in by these giants, leading small and medium enterprises to face the embarrassing situation of &#34;having money but no goods.&#34; Even if they manage to queue up for goods, by the time they arrive, the prices often experience several rounds of increases.</p>
<p>Moreover, for the giants, if they fail to secure an LTA for storage supply, the consequences can be quite severe. Recent personnel changes within Google are a microcosm of this: due to the failure to foresee market tightening and sign long-term agreements in advance, there was a shortage of HBM supply, directly leading to the departure of procurement executives.</p>
<h2>The Trapped 1:2^N Specification Trap</h2>
<p>In traditional physical architecture, the ratio of CPU to memory has long adhered to fixed proportions such as 1:2 or 1:4. In the current environment of soaring memory prices, this rigid specification has become a significant cost hazard. If a company's business is compute-intensive, to obtain sufficient CPU computing power, they often have to be forced to purchase redundant, high-premium memory resources. This &#34;upward matching&#34; waste becomes a heavy, unavoidable &#34;invisible tax&#34; during the hardware inflation cycle.</p>
<h2>The Deadly Threat of Bit Rot</h2>
<p>To hedge costs, some companies have begun to extend the lifespan of old servers or turn to low-end storage devices. However, this strategy harbors hidden dangers: the risk of data rot (Bit Rot) in old HDDs/SSDs increases significantly, and the ability to ensure data security declines sharply. Once a core asset is lost, the cost incurred will far exceed the savings from the hardware price difference</p>
<h2>III. Flexus X Flexible Computing Power - Using Technology to Hedge Hardware Inflation</h2>
<p>In the face of &#34;memory as expensive as gold&#34; in 2025, Huawei Cloud's trump card is the <strong>Flexus X series cloud servers</strong>.</p>
<h2>Flexible Computing: Breaking the Constraints of Physical Specifications</h2>
<p>Flexible computing is a black technology proposed and led by Huawei Cloud's Chief Architect and Huawei Fellow, Gu Jiong. It completely breaks the traditional cloud server ratio limitation of 1:2^N, pioneering support for custom vCPU and memory ratios such as <strong>3:1, 1:3, 2:5, 3:7</strong>.</p>
<p>For enterprises, this means &#34;paying only for the resources needed for business.&#34; When the unit price of memory skyrockets, Flexus X allows customers to precisely eliminate unnecessary memory investments based on business load, truly ensuring that every penny of IT investment is spent wisely.</p>
<p><img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/> https://static001.geekbang.org/infoq/f0/f09cdb54eb56ee420c78f95a8d176d3b.gif<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/></p>
<h2>Performance Monster, Flagship Experience</h2>
<p>In addition to extreme flexibility, Flexus X is also a &#34;monster&#34; in terms of performance. Thanks to Huawei Cloud's fully self-developed underlying stack advantages, Flexus X instances can provide up to 1.6 times the CPU computing power compared to industry-exclusive instances, with performance comparable to competitors' flagship models, but at less than 70% of the price of competitors' flagships.</p>
<p><img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/> https://static001.geekbang.org/infoq/3f/3f58ce8f6b47f890a2e7a32337d765fb.webp<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/> https://static001.geekbang.org/infoq/cb/cb5cfb1623a5506e21fc964a9fbddfdb.webp<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/></p>
<p>Even more impressive is its intelligent acceleration. Based on AI intelligent scheduling trained on large models, combined with X-Turbo intelligent acceleration technology, Flexus X can achieve performance up to 6 times that of competitors in key application scenarios such as MySQL, Redis, Nginx, PostgreSQL, and Memcached, and performs outstandingly on the currently popular AI application platform Dify
This leap in performance means that enterprises can handle higher concurrency with fewer resources, further diluting the cost per unit of computing power.</p>
<p><img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/> https://static001.geekbang.org/infoq/1e/1ef4b195bf1321ddc49a58d2c9936e01.webp<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/></p>
<p><img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/> https://static001.geekbang.org/infoq/05/05dac4f2446bab8f2de2664f2380b1e4.webp<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/></p>
<p><img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/> https://static001.geekbang.org/infoq/62/62f3c422b6612011e56bb20fb3e505e1.webp<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/></p>
<h2>Comprehensive Cost Reduction of 30% in Practical Results</h2>
<p>The theoretical advantages must ultimately be tested in practice. With the Huawei Cloud Migration Center MgC service, Flexus X can intelligently analyze the current business load of enterprises and accurately match the most suitable cloud server specifications. Data shows that after migrating traditional IT systems to the cloud with Flexus X instances, the overall cost reduction can reach 30%. Achieving a 30% cost reduction against the backdrop of hardware inflation is equivalent to creating a considerable &#34;net profit&#34; for enterprises.</p>
<h2>IV. OBS Object Storage: The &#34;Stabilizing Force&#34; Under Trillions of Data</h2>
<p>If computing power is the heart, then storage is the blood of the enterprise. As enterprises deepen their digital transformation, unstructured data (images, videos, logs, etc.) is experiencing explosive growth. Traditional local storage and small to medium-sized IDC often struggle with performance, scalability, and cost when faced with massive data.</p>
<p>Huawei Cloud Object Storage Service (OBS), with its deep technical accumulation in the storage field and full-stack self-research advantages, has become the optimal solution to cope with rising storage costs and ensure the security of data assets.</p>
<p><img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/> https://static001.geekbang.org/infoq/14/1497662ae03bf755c1d6af5cc04651d9.webp<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/></p>
<h2>Full-Stack Self-Developed &#34;Technical Moat&#34;</h2>
<p>In the field of cloud storage, Huawei is a unique presence. It is the only vendor in the industry that provides cloud services while also self-developing chips, servers, storage hardware, network devices, and cloud operating systems. This full-stack self-developed capability endows Huawei Cloud OBS with exceptional performance and reliability.</p>
<p>According to the Gartner &#34;2025 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms&#34; report, Huawei successfully entered the Leaders quadrant, ranking ahead in both &#34;Execution Ability&#34; and &#34;Completeness of Vision,&#34; making it the only Chinese vendor in this quadrant, which highlights Huawei's technological leadership and strong product capabilities in the storage field.</p>
<p>In addition to its technological leadership, Huawei's 36 years of telecom-grade quality management experience also brings unique advantages in storage reliability. Specifically in hardware, Huawei's storage products possess the richest experience in component selection, fault testing, and sub-health judgment algorithms in the industry. For example, Huawei's equipment corrosion-resistant design meets G2~GX (moderate to severe) levels, while industry peers typically only meet G1 (light) conditions. This extreme pursuit of hardware quality allows Huawei's cloud storage services to far exceed the reliability of typical IDC data centers.</p>
<h2>Multi-Dimensional Layering to Balance Cost and Performance</h2>
<p>In response to the demand for data tiering, Huawei Cloud OBS offers various types of storage, including standard storage, infrequent access storage, archive storage, and deep archive storage (limited public testing).</p>
<p>For frequently accessed hot data, standard storage provides high-performance and highly reliable services; for cold data that needs to be retained for a long time but accessed infrequently, deep archive storage offers extremely low-cost storage options. This intelligent tiered storage strategy not only meets the diverse storage needs of medium and large enterprises in the cloud but also helps customers significantly reduce long-term storage costs through automated data lifecycle management.</p>
<h2>Extreme Performance and Security Compliance</h2>
<p>In terms of performance, Huawei Cloud OBS supports tens of millions of TPS and millisecond-level response times, capable of meeting the stringent demands for high concurrency and low latency. By aggregating small objects and utilizing multi-threaded parallelism, it achieves a single-stream upload and download speed of 2.4Gb/s. Fully distributed metadata management supports unified management of hundreds of billions of objects in a single bucket, ensuring efficient and worry-free access to massive files.</p>
<p>On the security front, OBS provides fine-grained access control for accounts, buckets, objects, VPCs, as well as full-link security capabilities such as transmission encryption, storage encryption, and integrity verification, ensuring that data assets are completely secure and meeting various stringent compliance requirements.</p>
<p>Currently, Huawei Cloud OBS has gained the trust of leading enterprises such as Meitu, becoming a solid data foundation supporting their business development.</p>
<h2>Lightweight Option: Flexus OBS as a Boon for Small and Medium Enterprises</h2>
<p>For small and medium enterprises and specific scenarios, Huawei Cloud has also launched the highly cost-effective Flexus object storage.</p>
<p>Targeting scenarios such as data archiving, website construction, and content distribution, Flexus OBS helps enterprises achieve a comprehensive cost reduction of 20% through flexible combinations of lightweight specification packages. It inherits the extreme security and stable reliability of Huawei Cloud OBS, providing multi-layer reliability guarantees, with data durability reaching 99.999999999% (11 nines)
At the same time, its management is extremely simple, streamlining the data cloud process through multi-client tools, and the preset scenario templates make configuration unprecedentedly easy.</p>
<h2>VI. MgC One-Stop Migration - Eliminating &#34;Cloud Migration Anxiety&#34;</h2>
<p>Of course, for traditional IT companies, the biggest concern about cloud migration is often not how good the technology on the target end is, but whether the migration process is smooth and low-risk.</p>
<p>Huawei Cloud Migration Center MgC was born as a one-stop migration platform for this purpose. It carries Huawei Cloud's years of migration methodology and best practices and has successfully served over 500 major clients, including Shenzhou Zhuanche and Kingdee.</p>
<p><img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/> https://static001.geekbang.org/infoq/6c/6c1dc7537b95a7f6376d9f8cd01f663f.webp<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://www.infoq.cn/article/null"/></p>
<p>MgC has powerful multi-source collection and evaluation capabilities, supporting the collection of 15 subcategories of 7 types of resources, and can flexibly recommend target specifications based on business differences. Its efficient cloud-edge collaboration function connects with the source end through IOTDA, supporting batch push of over 1000 Agents within 10 minutes. This has improved migration efficiency by over 40%, greatly shortening the business cloud migration cycle and reducing migration costs.</p>
<h2>Now is the Best Time to Migrate to the Cloud</h2>
<p>The market environment in the second half of 2025 will be brutal for companies that still adhere to traditional IT architectures. The structural surge in DRAM and NAND prices, combined with the siphoning effect of AI on supply chain resources, has made &#34;self-built data centers&#34; and &#34;traditional hosting&#34; extremely expensive and high-risk choices. This is no longer just an IT technical issue, but a strategic issue concerning the health of corporate cash flow and data security.</p>
<p>In this era full of uncertainty, Huawei Cloud has successfully opened a path of &#34;cost reduction and efficiency enhancement&#34; in an inflationary environment through innovative products and services such as Flexus X cloud servers, OBS object storage, and MgC migration center.</p>
<p>With the flexible computing power of Flexus X, companies no longer bear the cost of rising memory prices from hardware vendors; through the full-stack self-research and intelligent grading of OBS, companies gain financial-grade data security and cost optimization; through the efficient migration of MgC, companies can lightly complete their modernization transformation.</p>
<p>Transferring the risk of rising physical hardware prices to a cloud platform with strong technical support capabilities and leveraging intelligent scheduling technology to tap into the potential of every computing resource is precisely the survival strategy Huawei Cloud offers to enterprises in adverse conditions. In a turbulent market, this is not only a technical choice but also a wise decision.</p>
<p>Now is the best time to migrate to the cloud</p>

<p>In 2025, global enterprises will face a super cycle of storage inflation, with significant increases in DRAM and NAND Flash prices, leading to higher IT costs. The fixed ratios of traditional IT architecture and tightened supply chains exacerbate the survival pressure on enterprises. Companies need to bid farewell to traditional IT and seek new architectural breakthroughs to cope with the end of hardware dividends and cost challenges</p>

- The article discusses the unprecedented "super inflation cycle" in IT hardware as 2025 brings significant price increases in DRAM and NAND Flash, impacting businesses' costs dramatically.  
- It highlights challenges faced by SMEs in securing supply due to long-term agreements being dominated by larger companies, leading to potential procurement failures.  
- To counter these issues, Huawei Cloud introduces solutions like Flexus X flexible computing and OBS object storage, aimed at reducing costs while maintaining high data security and performance efficiency during this inflationary period.

Breaking through the architecture in the era of storage inflation: Why 2025 is the "watershed" year for enterprises to say goodbye to traditional IT?