Kathy Gibson reports from Huawei’s head office in Shenzhen – When Huawei talks about becoming a force in the cloud computing market, it is speaking from a position of some strength.
The company has a long history as a major player in the telecommunications/carrier and mobile markets, so when it turned its attention to the enterprise space just a few years ago, it already had a range of products, services and – importantly – skills to help it make a mark.
The enterprise group is already a booming business of $2,5-billion, and carries a rich product portfolio that includes servers, storage, networking, security and communications that can address the needs of enterprise from their very largest data centres to small branch offices.
A visit to the Huawei head office in Shenzhen demonstrates just how big, and how organised, the company is. Housing 60 000 people, the campus covers several square kilometres. It is the nerve centre of an organisation that boasts 150 000 employees in 170 countries around the world.
Predictably, given its pedigree, Huawei has built its data centre product line-up on its networking expertise. The Agile Networking product line is a software-defined network (SDN) so switching can be transformed quickly and seamlessly on demand.
Within the Agile Networking line-up is a full suite of routing switches as well as an access layer. The company stays true to its roots with a range of both indoor and outdoor wireless access points.
Huawei is the third-biggest networking vendor in the world.
The networking portfolio is complemented by the Agile WAN, an optical transmission platform for long distance networking that currently holds the number one market share position.
Staying with networking, the Agile Branch is a distributed branch network solution.
No network can be complete without security, so Huawei adds firewalls, unified threat management devices and anti-DDoS appliances to the mix. The flagship product in the security line-up provides context-aware intrusion protection, network security, Web security, e-mail and data security, routing and intelligent management.
Building up from the network platform, Huawei offers a range of server products. These range from rack and blade servers to solutions tailored to meet specific needs.
Rounding out the data centre platform line-up is the OceanStor range of storage solutions. The OceanStor 9000 is specially designed for unstructured data and performing big data analytics, including storage, analysis and archiving in a single architecture. Up to 288 nodes can be configured.
The OceanStor 18800 is designed with disaster recovery failover in mind, offering realtime DR using a unified management controller.
Where Huawei goes beyond a line-up of platform products is its range of converged systems that effectively give customers a full data centre on demand.
The flagship data centre product is Huawei’s FusionCube, a converged infrastructure solution that includes server, storage and networking in one box. This system has been certified to run SAP’s HANA in-memory analytics, which it does with industry-beating speed and throughput.
A modular data centre is also on offer, which customers can configure as needed, adding new racks to the housing as their needs change.
A containerised data centre has been designed for quick deployment and includes all the elements needed to get a data centre up and running in the shorted possible time. Housed in standard shipping containers, this data centre takes just 10 weeks to design and build, and another week to deploy on site, giving customers a full data centre – including servers, storage and networking – in just three months from order to handover.
For branch office, the Micro DC is a half-sized cabinet containing everything needed to run a branch, including server, storage and networking, Huawei uses these Micro DCs in its 170 branch offices around the world.
Cloud-based disaster recover allows a single DR centre to support 32 data centres, with active-active failover at distances up to 300km.
Huawei also offers a number of products and solutions that complement the core data centre platform.
Its desktop cloud offering, or cloud terminal, is a virtualised desktop that can be repurposed according to user requirements as needed.
The eSpace converged network supports meeting room devices for voice and videoconferencing as well as contact centres and unified communications solutions.
Complementary products include LTE trunking for campus-wide communications and solutions designed specifically for vertical industries, such as the virtual teller machine (VTM) which connects to the system as well as to the contact centre to allow a majority of banking transactions to be concluded outside the branch.
As they say in the IT industry, it’s important for companies to “eat their own dog food”, and Huawei does just this, using its own products and technologies in its extensive data centre operations.
The main data centre is housed in the Shenzhen campus, linking to extended data centres in the UK, Hong Kong, Russia and the US. A disaster recovery centre is in Nanjing. The head office data centre also networks to the smaller data centres in 140 locations around the world.
The Huawei data centre has been operational since 2002. It covers 1 600 square metres, housing 5 000 servers and more than 1 000 network devices as well as several banks of OceanStor storage devices.
All of Huawei’s new products are first used in the company’s own data centre before being made available to customers.
