Peter Zhou, President of Huawei’s IT Product Line, is the public face of data storage technologies at the Chinese telecoms to IT giant. At MWC 2023, in between meetings with many of the 2,500 Huawei clients who made the trip to Barcelona, Peter described Europe’s buoyant market as one of the drivers behind 40% year-on-year growth in Huawei’s international on-premise data storage revenues.
In Europe, Huawei envisages continuing rapid growth as enterprises re-tool their private clouds to deal with accelerating cloudification.
“IT technology has been developing very quickly in Europe,” says Peter. “People here have accepted the case for cloudification quicker than in other regions.”
Peter adds: “For the future evolution of multi-cloud, we definitely believe that we need to continue innovating, particularly in data storage.”
Enterprises are investing in on-premise infrastructure in order to keep pace with runaway data volumes, mitigate security threats and cope with the rise of container-based and serverless application architectures.
At MWC, Peter spent much of his time discussing Huawei’s new multi-cloud storage solution, which supports intelligent cross-cloud data tiering, cross-cloud data visibility and enhanced data mobility.
“This is a must,” Peter says, referring to the last item on the list. “The data in data storage has to support data mobility, sharing between multiple clouds.”
“If we have an application in the public cloud, it must be able to access data in private clouds, rather than copying data from on-premise to the public cloud, which really isn’t cost-effective.”
For Peter’s on-premise offerings, the innovation agenda is also being driven by spiraling volumes of data, which accounts for Huawei’s aggressive focus on hardware size reduction, compression technologies and decreasing energy consumption.
Other on-premise solutions for enterprise data centers unveiled at MWC included an industry- first unified disaster recovery solution based on Storage & Optical Connection Coordination (SOCC) and multi-layer ransomware protection that integrates networking and storage to deliver 99.9% accuracy.
Huawei already offers a full enterprise storage portfolio, covering data production, backup and archiving, as well tiered solutions for hot, warm and cold data. At MWC, however, Peter’s on-premise division announced that it will be broadening its focus to include small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
This is part of a company-wide effort, involving the roll-out of more than 200 new products and services for SMEs including cost-effective primary and back-up storage offerings based around the OceanStor Dorado 2000 and OceanProtect X3000.
Peter doesn’t foresee an end to on-premise demand.
He says: “People may think the public cloud is expanding and that business in the on-premise data center is shrinking. People have that kind of worry. But the real results show that the facts are different.”
“In the beginning, people choose public cloud infrastructure, but then they become more rational in terms of the cost and the return. And they start to think about the future evolution of their technology needs.”
According to Peter, that’s precisely where European enterprises find themselves: investing in on-premise storage upgrades to future-proof their multi-cloud strategies.
“We think there’s a big change happening in Europe,” he adds. “The largest enterprises will be running multiple private clouds alongside multiple public clouds. That’s the reality.”
Find out more about Huawei’s MWC program here.
Data Management