Huawei a big storage hitter despite international troubles

Challenging historical past

Huawei has a complicated and controversial historical past.

The enterprise is predicated in Shenzhen and was based in 1987. It began out constructing telecom switches (PBXs) and expanded into mobile community gear. It overtook Sweden’s Ericsson as the biggest telecoms gear provider in 2012, and overtook Apple in smartphone gross sales in 2018.

However, the agency’s sturdy ties to the Chinese authorities and navy brought on controversy and proceed to take action. Ren Zhengfei, the agency’s founder, was a senior officer within the People’s Liberation Army. Early contracts with the Chinese navy and public sector supported its development. The agency has additionally confronted accusations of breaching mental property legal guidelines, an excessively shut relationship to the Chinese authorities, espionage – together with again doorways in its telecoms package that allegedly enable Chinese authorities to intercept messages – and bans on its gear within the UK, US, EU, Canada and India. That controversy is ongoing.

Huawei is, nonetheless, quickly rising gross sales and market share. Data from IDC’s Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker for exterior storage – so arrays – confirmed that Huawei elevated its market share by just below 9% from 2016 to 2021.

Of the opposite storage “majors”, solely Pure Storage managed optimistic market share development. The identical rankings place Huawei fourth within the international market, behind Dell, HPE and NetApp however forward of Hitachi Vantara and IBM.

In 2022, Huawei posted revenues of CNY642.3 billion, CNY35.6 billion in internet income, and spent 25% of its revenues on R&D, in accordance with its annual report. The provider doesn’t get away knowledge storage revenues, however revenues for its enterprise division – which incorporates knowledge storage – had been CNY133,151 in 2022, behind each the provider and client enterprise. Cloud computing revenues got here to CYN45,342. The firm employs 207,000 folks worldwide.

Huawei storage merchandise

Huawei teams its {hardware} knowledge storage underneath the OceanStor model, with six major product traces.

OceanStor Dorado are Huawei’s all-flash methods. At the excessive finish (Dorado 8000 and 18000), these scale to 32 controllers and provide block and file entry modes with NVMe and different SSD kind elements. Other Dorado arrays are the 5000/6000, 3000 and 2000, and scale down in numbers of controllers and drive capability, though the latter seems to be block entry solely.

OceanStor Pacific is flash and HDD-equipped scale-out {hardware}, and is available in product traces aimed toward efficiency (flash), balanced (ie, efficiency and secondary storage however all HDD with some SSD cache), video (streaming and archiving, all-HDD once more), and archiving with HDD.

OceanStor is the hybrid line. The OceanStor 18510 and 18810scale to 32 controller and permit file, block and object (S3) entry with NVMe and SAS (flash and HDD) capability. OceanStor 6810, 5xxx collection run to 16 controllers, whereas the 2xxx collection run to eight controllers and simply SAS capability (ie, not NVMe).

FusionCube is Huawei’s converged infrastructure provide, and is available in a vary of rackspace sizes (8U to 42U), plus a knowledge or hypervisor-focussed FusionCube 1000 (HDD and NVMe) hyper-converged equipment, plus FusionCube software program hyper-converged infrastructure.

OceanProtect is the provider’s devoted backup, DR and archiving line, which incorporates backup home equipment (OceanProtect Backup Storage) and a distributed equipment product (Huawei Data Protection Appliance).

OceanDisk Smart Disk Enclosure connects to cloud storage for diskless datacentres.

Huawei’s cloud provide spans quite a few product varieties that embody object, file and block storage, in addition to backup and catastrophe restoration providers.

Aside from its cloud provide, Huawei appears to lack knowledge storage consumption fashions for on-premise {hardware}. Container storage seems to be delivered from its Dorado storage arrays by way of CSI drivers. 

Workloads and market sectors

Huawei’s background in telecoms means this stays a key vertical for the corporate – its first storage merchandise had been designed for telco operators. The provider additionally has a sturdy public sector buyer base in China.

Today, Huawei’s enterprise division positions itself much less by {industry} vertical than by capabilities equivalent to big knowledge, resilient methods, and AI and machine studying. The provider is, nonetheless, properly positioned to offer expertise the place these verticals converge, equivalent to China’s fast-growing automotive {industry}.

The firm is pushing workloads that require constant excessive efficiency – via its all-flash methods – in addition to resilience and the place knowledge volumes are set to scale. Huawei executives discuss a market with Yottabyte (a quadrillion GB) capacities, and the enterprise seems to have each intention of competing in that house. However, it additionally stresses the necessity for decrease working prices, and lowering power consumption via technological innovation.

In phrases of geography, in accordance with Huawei’s annual report, China stays its largest market. In 2022, its revenues had been CYN403,999 in its home market, CYN149,206 in EMEA and CYN 48,048 in Asia Pacific. Americas income got here to CYN31,898. These figures replicate, partially, the impression of sanctions and bans on Huawei within the United States, the UK, and different markets. In reality, the provider closed its UK enterprise enterprise, together with storage in 2020. It does nonetheless function in another European nations. 

Necessity, the mom of invention

Although Huawei has pulled out of a variety of markets just lately – in addition to closing its enterprise division within the UK, it’s reported to have pulled out or is pulling out of the opposite Five Eyes nations and India – the enterprise continues to take a position and innovate.

Huawei can not receive X86 chips for its storage controllers as a result of US sanctions, so it develops its personal controllers, referred to as Kunpeng, primarily based on ARM cores. These are made by Huawei’s fabless semi-conductor operation, HiSilicon, and supply as much as 64 cores.

The provider has additionally developed its personal SSD design, with a 1.7-inch kind issue, slightly than the industry-standard 2.5”. This permits 36 drive modules in a 2U enclosure.

It’s this degree of innovation – coupled with that huge R&D funds – that makes Huawei a provider for CIOs to look at, even when they can not at present purchase its {hardware}.