Equipment maker Huawei has built a cloud data centre infrastructure vehicle for transporting operators into the cloud.
It unveiled the service as Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona, on the same day that Amdocs and Red Hat announced they’d created a system to help mobile operators to throw off their fixed infrastructure shackles.
The Huawei Cloud Data Center is to be an open ecosystem with joint innovations from SAP, Accenture and a range of other partners. Cloud migration services will be provided by SAP, while Accenture will offer the development of enterprise-class private cloud applications.
At the launch of the new ‘application centric, cloud 3.0 data center’ Zheng Yelai, President of Huawei IT Product Lines, promised Huawei would combine mission-critical servers, storage consolidation, cloud fabric software defined networking, modular data centers and other IT concepts into a single, highly flexible cloud data center platform.
Telco carriers can now get a single simple system for resource management, elastic expansion, convergence and visualized operations and management, Yelai claimed. Huawei promised to harmonise each carrier’s services, operations, infrastructures and networks at Huawei’s data centers. The problem for most carriers is that they have data in different silos and business support systems and operating systems that cannot be fashioned, in their existing format, into a cohesive system, according to Yelai. This means that carriers will be unable to compete with new companies that can run their data services across any telco’s network, because they were invented in the age of the cloud. By hosting the carriers, Huawei’s Cloud Data Center can liberate the carriers, said Yelai.
The cloud, Yelai said, could smash the silo-like structure of conventional IT and empower carriers with more choices in their cloud transformations. With their revitalized deployment strategies, telcos become strategically positioned as enablers of the digital economy, claimed Yelai.
Huawei’s Cloud Data Center will be a strong advocator of open standards in cloud platforms, it said, as it contributes to open source communities such as OpenStack, Hadoop and Spark. In January 2016, Huawei was elected to the OpenStack board of directors.
“We are building clouds that benefit carriers the most through shortened service provisioning, reduced OPEX and automated operations and management,” said Yelai, “These improvements allow carriers to develop new business in public cloud and effectuate their transformations.”
