The already fairly busy storage and cloud market have an extra player with Huawei. The company is committed to saving space and modular data centres.
The modular data centre is not unique to Huawei (Schneider, among others, has modules with pre-built elements, and Automation also works with containers). Still, the company does go a long way. It provides a full-stack solution for businesses. “We also combine the storage with the necessary battery support,” says Bob He, who heads Huawei Digital Power for Western Europe.
For example, the company shows the modules for prefab stairwells, meeting rooms and more – a matter of putting together a fully-fledged building with Lego blocks. The chipsets for the servers and batteries are also of our own design.
It is, among other things, with those batteries that the Chinese tech giant wants to stand out. Every data centre is equipped with a series of batteries that have to take over in the event of a power outage. In addition, Huawei supplies CloudLi, a ‘smart’ lithium battery that can be managed remotely. This means, among other things, that you know when the battery is almost empty and where problems may arise. They are also a lot smaller than more traditional backup batteries.
Huawei uses the system, among other things, in its network cabinets, where space-saving and management are perhaps even more important, but also supplies them to on-premise data centres. In addition, the batteries are compatible with legacy batteries that are already in use, allowing for gradual replacement.
Huawei has been building data centres for about ten years now. China is one of the cloud players, with customers mainly for domestic start-ups and foreign companies that need a Chinese partner. With the prefab data centres, it now also supplies a complete on-premise infrastructure. “We mainly target companies that have a very short time-to-market,” said He, who spoke to Data News at Mobile World Congress 2022.
There are already some of these installations worldwide, but in Europe, Huawei is only taking its first steps on the market. For example, some of the modules were rolled out in Spain and Ireland but as part of a larger existing building. So we will have to wait a little longer for a full prefab data centre. Or anyway. “Six months,” says Bob He. That’s how long it would take to build a complete data centre with prefab elements instead of two years for a more traditional data centre.
For Huawei, it is already an extra market to focus on. US and European governments have more or less banned the company from smartphones and network infrastructure for fear of interference from the Chinese government. As a result, data centres must offer an alternative sales market.
“We see the future shifting to large data centres for cloud services, and then smaller edge data centres,” He says. ‘Now that we use technology such as AI and data lakes, we will always need more data centres to run and analyze all of that. And that requires large amounts of energy. With the current energy prices, there is a lot of innovation in more economical and efficient appliances, and we want to make a difference there.’
