Huawei’s take on how ICT infrastructure can curb energy consumption

Energy consumption by data centres is a growing concern as digitisation accelerates. What can be done to reduce energy consumption by ICT infrastructure?
The digital economy has generated more data than ever before and as per industry estimates, more than 90 per cent of computing power and data will be aggregated in data centres by 2025. This will result in an even more expansive global data centre footprint which places tremendous pressure on the environment. Therefore, the need for greener ICT infrastructure is a major priority for organisations and governments. All-flash data centres facilitate green and energy-efficient storage, leading to the sustainable development of enterprises by significantly reducing the data centre and carbon footprint.

There are so many ways in which we enable customers to build green, low-carbon data centres. At the facility layer, our full-link converged power module that runs on high-power density UPS integrated with the UPS power distribution centre (PDC) helps reduce the data centre footprint by 47 per cent. Such a module also fully utilises data centre space, saving more than 10 per cent of the IT equipment space. Huawei also offers an indirect evaporative cooling solution EHU (environment handling unit) that runs on its unique polymer heat exchanger to maximise natural cooling sources. The EHU can also collaborate with iCooling, an artificial intelligence (AI), energy optimisation technology, to reduce the PUE to less than 1.2 compared with the chilled water-based cooling system, reducing annual energy consumption by over 14 per cent.

At the infrastructure layer, one way to reduce power consumption within the data centre is through the use of all-flash storage. With fewer moving parts, and higher density, SSDs require far less power – and cooling – than traditional hard disks and are more reliable. They are also more efficient from a data point of view, reducing access latency by half to 0.05ms, and potentially increasing backup speed by a factor of three.

Lastly, at the cloud platform layer, our intelligent cloud management and data lake enable diverse management and agile services.

How can organisations leverage storage to drive digital transformation?
The rapid growth of data places higher demands on data storage for enterprises to run the business more intelligently, securely, and sustainably. The top requirements and challenges for IT infrastructure now are security and reliability, cost reduction efficiency improvement, data innovation, real-time agility, and intelligent management. Driven by these requirements and challenges, all-flash data centres are one of the essential development directions for future data centres. With high density, high reliability, low latency, and low power consumption, they can carry enterprise core services more effectively and meet the demanding workloads of critical applications.

Flash offers greater performance with unparalleled speed. For example, the Huawei OceanStor Dorado offers up to 21 million IOPS, 0.05 ms latency which delivers up to 5x better business performance than traditional storage architecture. Flash also offers unparalleled resiliency and the ability to scale. OceanStor, for instance, delivers 99.99999 per cent proven availability, 24/7 business continuity and 100 per cent data protection.

Cybersecurity continues to challenge businesses across the region despite concerted efforts to stem cybercrime. How can companies leverage storage as part of an overall security strategy?
Business and IT leaders cite cybersecurity as one of their biggest concerns. Well-publicised data hacks have caused millions of dollars in losses and even more in reputational damage. The first step is realising that security is a shared concern. By working together with industry, government and within global consensus, we can go a long way to alleviate some of the cybersecurity challenges organisations face. Cybersecurity is an integral part of our products, it is in our DNA. Huawei builds cybersecurity assurance into the entire product lifecycle and all processes, providing resilient end-to-end capabilities that ensure the security of customer data and applications based on international best practices such as NIST’s cybersecurity framework, which we referenced extensively to ensure compliance for our ransomware protection storage solution. Ensuring the highest standards in cybersecurity isn’t a choice, but a responsibility; a responsibility that accepts no compromises. As such, we made ourselves go through rigorous third party assessment where OceanStor Dorado storage solutions have obtained the Common Criteria EAL 3.0+ certification, where Common Criteria is the gold standard in product security. And you can be sure that we will endeavour to build on our customers’ trust in us with our recently launched OceanProtect data protection series that will provide customers with end-to-end complete data protection solutions, ensuring peace of mind for them.

What is Huawei’s storage value proposition for Middle East organisations?
Huawei offers leading storage solutions. Our data storage is ranked second worldwide for sales in 2021. Huawei storage has achieved Gartner recognition for more than six years, while the all-flash OceanStor Dorado has been chosen by ‘Gartner Peer Insights’ for ‘Best Customers’ Choice’.

These advances are backed by continuous R&D investments that ensure Huawei stays at the forefront of ICT innovation. Globally, Huawei is now ranked as the second-highest private sector investor in R&D. The company operates 12 R&D centres, over 4000 R&D personnel, and 3000 patents dedicated to storage, helping more than 15,000 customers in over 150 countries. But we will not stop here. We will continue to innovate in the storage and data centre field to bring our customers the most advanced and leading products in the industry.

With ongoing investment in technologies that offer faster, better, and more powerful data centres, our green, reliable, and intelligent data centres can help enterprises of all shapes and sizes to drive their business forward. In addition, we also have a comprehensive global product supply chain system, which can effectively guarantee the quick supply of storage equipment. For example, in the Middle East, we can ensure fast delivery of storage products in just one to three weeks, helping customers in quick deployment and faster time to market.

What would you say about Huawei’s efforts in building an ICT ecosystem?
Building on our strengths in ICT technologies, we have continuously made efforts to create a digital ecosystem where all players create and share value together in order to help industries go digital. Over 700 cities and 267 Fortune Global 500 companies worldwide have chosen us as their partner for digital transformation, while over 30,000 partners are working with us to serve the enterprise market. We aim to grow, innovate, and win together with our partners, and jointly develop more and more competitive solutions that can help our customers dive deep into digital and create new value. We will continue working closely with partners in its software, service, and hardware ecosystems to systematically integrate existing technologies and innovate to better serve our customers.

Read: Improving data centre power consumption and energy efficiency