To achieve their goals of Digital Transformation, many organisations have looked closely at their data centre environment. Wang Di, President, Huawei Digital Power, Middle East, highlights examples of how Huawei has worked closely with customers in the region to enable their organisations to scale.
Across the entirety of 2020, the business environment has become highly disrupted. A pandemic forced office closures and social distancing, which had a flow-on effect in creating job losses, market volatility and supply chain disruption.
For the technology industry, it also had the effect of bringing forward a decade’s worth of innovation, as enterprises utilised technology to achieve business resilience and look for new competitive advantage. As noted in a McKinsey report, Innovation in a crisis: Why it is more critical than ever, from June: “In our recent survey of more than 200 organisations across industries, more than 90% of executives said they expect the fallout from COVID-19 to fundamentally change the way they do business over the next five years, with almost as many asserting that the crisis will have a lasting impact on their customers’ needs.”
That change that the executives referred to in the McKinsey survey is Digital Transformation. As noted in a report on Fortune, 77% of CEOs have significantly accelerated their Digital Transformation strategy and investment this year.
To achieve this transformation and deliver an innovative, agile and resilient environment, many organisations have needed to take a renewed look at their data centre environment.
The challenges with innovation and digital-first businesses
Transformation projects are always challenging, particularly when they’ve been accelerated by five or even 10 years. The rapid acceleration of data accumulation and analysis, coupled with the increasing complexity of data centre and cloud environments, and the need for greater capacity, power and speed, has created multi-faceted challenges for enterprises.
Huawei’s Smart Data Center Solution has been designed to meet these challenges, by bringing collaboration between vendor and customer together to design the environment specifically to meet the enterprises’ needs, while at the same time lowering costs, building scalability into the solution and transforming the environment to account for the new ways of working and engaging with customers. It does not only cleverly utilise resources to improve productivity, but also add values to the data centre facilities.
Meanwhile, power consumption by the data centre is an escalating problem for organisations. Data centres currently consume around 2% of total world electricity, but that could rise to become as high as 8% by 2030. With greater social and regulatory interest in power consumption than ever, enterprises need to have a renewed focus on sustainability.
Huawei vows to share social responsibility and success with partners. The Smart Data Center Solution reaffirms the company’s commitment to a low carbon footprint, which will help enterprises meet their social corporate citizenship requirements. Additionally, this green solution helps organisations minimise costs with a lower TCO by minimising the escalating energy bills.
The Huawei Smart Data Center in action
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has an ambitious programme to transform the nation to become a technology and innovation hub. The project, titled ‘Saudi Vision 2030’ is a combination of economic action plan and national transformation strategy. As part of this strategy, a subsidiary of the Saudi Electricity Company (Dawiyat) is rolling fibre to the home networks to the major cities and rapidly scaling the Kingdom’s communications environment.
As a new entrant into broadband services, Dawiyat had relatively small technical and maintenance teams. This led it to engage with Huawei for the FusionDC1000A Prefabricated Modular Data Center Solution. This data centre could be positioned outdoors, separate from the IT equipment room and has allowed Dawiyat to deploy communications services on-site, where space is often at a premium and it’s difficult to deploy more traditional data centre solutions. Furthermore, the FusionDC1000A has allowed Dawiyat to work quickly against ambitious deadlines – from hosting and commission, as the solution takes just a day to deploy.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, Huawei has also assisted the highly modern and innovative city of Abu Dhabi with its on city-building projects. This city’s legacy data centre environment was unable to scale to future development requirements, due to the growth in services and a massive increase in data volume.
The solution was a Tier-IV disaster recovery data centre – the Huawei FusionModule2000. As a modular data centre solution, the FusionModule2000 was prefabricated in the factory and rapidly brought online on site. As a modular data centre, it will continue to support the sustainable growth in services for the city, while at the same time offering a 2% improvement in power consumption thanks to Huawei’s proprietary UPS design.
To meet the needs that rapid transformation has placed on organisations with the rapid growth in data, the deployment of applications and technology on edge and the need to work with greater agility, many data centre environments need a re-think.
Deploying scalable and sustainable solutions such as Huawei’s modular data centre solutions will help organisations prepare their environments for the next decade of innovation ahead.