Huawei does not intend to become a data center operator (colocation) and intends to be a data center technology provider and build data center facilities for telecom operators, enterprises and governments around the world, said a senior company official.
“If a technology provider becomes the roommate provider itself, they are competing with their customers. They would rather be a technology provider and build it for customers for their internal use or their activity as data center colocation operators. "said Sanjay Kumar Sainani, vice president and chief technology officer of global data center solutions at Huawei Technologies. an exclusive from TechRadar Middle East.
Huawei in the Middle East combines its own data centers and leases colocation space, including in Dubai, for internal use and to provide managed services to its customers.
"Even in China, we rent space to other vendors while owning our own," he said.
Huawei's Power Network business is organized around five offerings: telecom power systems, data center installation solutions, solar inverters for solar farms, integrated power systems, and power conversion systems for electric vehicles. .
What are the different layers of a data center?
The data center is layer one of the four layers. The data center is the necessary infrastructure, which includes a power and cooling infrastructure, backup systems, and a management platform to host the IT infrastructure.
In the new digital economy, service providers, co-location operators, offer data center services as a service.
The second layer is the compute, storage, and network computing infrastructure layer, also known as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), while the third, which hosts the operating system, is called the platform. of Service (PaaS) and the fourth layer is applications and is known as Software as a Service (SaaS).
In the new economy, all layers come together to offer new services like IaaS, Paas, Saas, etc.
20 clients in GCC
For businesses, Sainani said Huawei offered technology and solutions ranging from installations to platforms to the first three layers.
"The facility layer is Capex heavy and very sticky. This can't be changed very quickly and people need to be very careful investing in the facility layer. Every three to five years they will swap/upgrade their IT infrastructure, but you will not change the infrastructure of the facilities every three or five years," he said.
Furthermore, he said that sharing activities were growing at a rapid rate, with more and more companies opting to purchase facilities as a service rather than own them.
In addition, various IaaS, PaaS and SaaS providers require facilities to be able to offer their solutions and services. "Colocation offers a better value proposition in many settings," he said.
"Twenty years ago, IT was a support system, but now it has become a production system," he added.
The world's leading manufacturer of networking equipment and the world's second-largest smartphone manufacturer began building data centers in the Middle East from 2015 and already has more than 30 MW of data centers delivered and under construction for around than 20 clients in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
"Increasingly, scanning is leading to more servers, storage and connectivity. Consumers have started to consider buying it as a service," he said.
Small Capex and Opex
For the first time in many decades, Sainani said that several technologies have converged simultaneously, Cloud, IoT, AI, Big Data 5G and AI, creating a "single environment" where almost any idea can become an application.
"Most data centers built in the last decade are overcrowded or outdated, creating new challenges for our customers. New applications require data centers of all shapes and sizes, from edge data centers housed closer to users to larger cloud data centers," he said.
With the current economic scenario, he said that the expectation was to make the installation of the data center with less Capex and available in a short time, but that the objective was to reduce operating costs by ensuring high electrical and operational efficiency and, most importantly, , building it to facilitate changes. / changes.
"Huawei builds modular, scalable, and highly efficient data centers that combine efficient power conversion and cooling systems with the use of AI to optimize power consumption." throughout its life cycle. Data centers can be built with reduced time to market thanks to prefabricated, modular construction," he said.