Huawei OceanStor Dorado supports Non-disruptive Upgrade (NDU), which allows the storage system's software (firmware) to be upgraded while services are running. In a traditional storage environment, an upgrade might require a system reboot or cause a failover that interrupts I/O for several seconds or minutes. However, Dorado's NDU leverages the multi-controller architecture and advanced caching mechanisms.
During an NDU, the system upgrades controllers one by one or in batches. While one controller is being upgraded and rebooted, its workloads are transparently taken over by other active controllers in the same cluster. Because the host-side multipathing software handles the path failover and the storage system maintains cache mirroring, the application servers experience zero downtime and negligible performance impact. This feature is essential for mission-critical environments that require 24/7 availability and cannot afford scheduled maintenance windows for routine software updates.

In Huawei OceanStor storage systems utilizing RAID 2.0+ and the SmartMatrix architecture, the "write penalty" associated with traditional RAID is mitigated through Full-Stripe Writes. In a partial write (where only some data in a stripe is updated), a RAID 5 setup usually suffers a write penalty of 4 (Reading old data, reading old parity, writing new data, writing new parity).
However, Huawei's controllers utilize a large cache to aggregate incoming data. When enough data is collected to fill an entire stripe (e.g., 8 data chunks plus 1 parity chunk in an 8+1 RAID 5 setup), the system performs a Full-Stripe Write. In this scenario, the system calculates the parity in the CPU/cache and writes the entire stripe to the disks at once. Since no old data or old parity needs to be read from the physical disks before writing, the disk-level write penalty is 0. This significantly enhances the write performance of hybrid arrays, especially those using mechanical HDDs which are highly sensitive to the latency of extra read/write operations.