Huawei made a number of announcements aimed at the data center space at its Cloud Congress 2012 at the Shanghai International Convention Center earlier this month. It was the perfect platform - attended by about 3000 data center professionals, interested in cloud computing, virtualization, data center planning and design and data center network and security.

One of the highlights of the event was the official announcement of Huawei’s agreement with Intel to establish a global strategic partnership for research and development in IT products and solutions. Together, the companies will jointly develop competitive servers, storage, and other data center and cloud computing products and solutions, while exploring market opportunities and promoting dual market branding.

“Huawei and Intel have cooperated with each other for more than ten years. The signing of the strategic partnership agreement will promote our cooperation to a new level.” Zheng Ye, President of Huawei’s IT Product Line says.

The companies have already been working together. In July, Huawei and Intel launched the Huawei Tecal V2 high-end server series, based on the Intel Xeon processor.

Agile Data Center solutions
Huawei also used the event to launch its Agile Data Center solutions, which includes micro data centers, an integrated testing cloud solution and the ManageOne data center management solution.

Huawei says its micro data center is made up of cabinet, power supply and distribution equipment, sensors, a cooling system, network, security, servers and integrated management software. It claims it is the only product in the industry which supports unified monitoring and management of the computer room and IT infrastructure and has been designed to meet large companies’ requirement for “comprehensive network management, ICT integration, and quick delivery” while pursuing a rapid growth and expansion strategy.

“The micro data center is a plug-and-play game, which can be deployed within three hours. It is capable of reducing installation cost by 80%, and annual maintenance cost by 66%.” Huawei says.

Its integrated testing cloud solution enables virtualization, standardization and automation of integrated testing. Huawei says that “a standardized test environment for resource allocation can help enterprises to reduce 50% of manpower resources required for test environment allocation, configuration, operation and maintenance”. “While a virtualized pool of IT resources can enhance the asset utilization rate by 75% and reduces business upgrade cycles from several weeks to several minutes, and automatic coding and testing can reduce operation cost and achieve better test quality.”

ManageOne, also part of the Agile offering, is data center management solution Huawei says is designed to unify the management of existing IT systems, new IT systems and the heterogeneous technology environment. By deploying the ManageOne solution, it says a company’s IT staff can manage enterprise group data centers, regional data centers and branch data centers with a single, unified management platform.

Sources from Huawei told Focus that the solution has already been deployed in China Mobile’s Northern China 300,000 sq m data center. They said the solution can bring about a 30% reduction of power supply cost while ensuring Power Usage Effectiveness remains low - 1.3 – across the campus.

Committing to the data center
Huawei has more than ten years of experience in providing data center solutions. In 2001, it began to build up its expertise in data center construction, operation and maintenance, building data centers for itself. In 2010 it started to invest heavily in the research and development of cloud computing data centers.

In 2011, Huawei announced its Yufan Plan, a project aiming to catch the opportunities of the promising cloud computing market, together with more than 300 partners including IBM and Intel, Accenture, Citrix and CA.

Huawei says it currently has more than 6,000 staff working on research and development (R&D) for cloud computing solutions, and plans to increase its R&D staff to more than 10,000 next year. At HCC2012, Huawei launched the world’s largest desktop cloud, which can be used by 70,000 users simultaneously.

Huawei has participated in the construction of more than 250 data centers for its global customers, including China Mobile’s Northern China data center, the data center for the State Information Centre of China and the first medical cloud in Shanghai. Among these, 35 are cloud computing data centers.