Huawei OceanStor 18000 Series Enterprise Storage System Received the Frost & Sullivan 2013 New Product Innovation Leadership Award
Shenzhen, China, December 19, 2013 – Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, today announced that its flagship enterprise storage system, the Huawei OceanStor 18000 series was awarded the 2013 New Product Innovation Leadership Award in the High-end Storage Category by Frost & Sullivan. This award is a testament to Huawei’s ongoing efforts in the innovation of enterprise storage technologies and products, which is also a technology domain that has recorded significant growth rate in sales.
“The high-end storage market has been blooming in recent years, where market demands are focused on data protection and disaster recovery,” said Mr. Fox Hu, Director of TMT Industry, Frost & Sullivan. “Key industry vendors have been devoted to the development of more reliable high-end storage solutions with more innovative technologies, and Huawei has been one of the key industry vendors who have been making remarkable achievements in this field.”
"We are delighted that our ongoing efforts in technology research and innovation are recognized by Frost & Sullivan and the industry," said Mr. Fan Ruiqi, Presidentof Huawei’s IT Storage Product Line. ”Since the launch of OceanStor 18000 enterprise storage system in September 2012, as of beginning of December, 121 sets of OceanStor 18000 have already been purchased by customers in the China market alone. With Industry and customer recognition, we are committed to the ongoing innovation of customer-centric enterprise technologies and product improvements, enabling customers to construct reliable and efficient storage platforms. ”
As the first high-end storage system designed and manufactured in China, the Huawei OceanStor 18000 series enterprise storage system has been known for its security, reliability, flexibility and efficiency. Featuring high speed and large capacity cache, the OceanStor 18000 series is scalable to up to 16 controllers and has a large internal bandwidth to ensure overall reliability and performance. A number of Huawei-developed technologies are also adopted, including the Smart Matrix Architecture and RAID2.0+ technology, which have been widely recognized in the industry and among customers.
The Huawei Smart Matrix Architecture is an intelligent virtualized system architecture for enterprise storage systems. It provides high flexibility and can significantly improve speed of data exchange, ensuring high reliability and improving storage performance at the same time.
Developed by Huawei, RAID2.0+ ensures two-layer virtualization in the storage system. The base layer is developed into a fully virtualized resource pool, which helps to accelerate data recovery by 20 times and lowers disk failure rate. With fine-grained data management and the Smart series software, the upper layer improves resource utilization by 3 times.
With the combination of Smart Matrix Architecture, RAID2.0+ technology and other technologies, OceanStor 18000 Series is able to achieve higher security and reliability, ensuring greater flexibility and efficiency.
Image 1: Mr. Jing Ning (Right), Marketing Director of Huawei IT Storage Product Line, receives the 2013 New Product Innovation Leadership Award in High-End Storage Market from Frost & Sullivan representative, Mr. Fox Hu (Left), Director of TMT Industry, China.
Image 2: Huawei’s OceanStor 18000 series enterprise storage system was awarded with the 2013 New Product Innovation Leadership Award in High-End Storage Market by Frost & Sullivan
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Lenovo looking at acquisitions to expand enterprise unit
Lenovo looking at acquisitions to expand enterprise unit | PCWorld
Agam Shah
- Dec 4, 2013 1:35 PM
- earlier this year rumors surfaced that the Chinese company was negotiating to acquire IBM’s x86 server operations. Guillen declined to comment on whether negotiations took place.
Lenovo is the world’s top PC vendor, but is not yet a significant player in the server market. According to Gartner, Lenovo was the world’s ninth largest server vendor during the third quarter this year, shipping 57,929 units, growing from 55,467 units in last year’s third quarter. By comparison, the world’s top server vendor, Hewlett-Packard, shipped 669,103 units.
”Most of [Lenovo’s] server business does come from China, but they did show some decent growth this quarter, albeit from smaller bases, in Canada, Eastern Europe and the U.S. That helped their overall numbers,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner.
Lenovo’s enterprise products today include single- and two-socket tower and rack servers. The company plans to introduce new two-way servers early next year, and offers a four-socket server in China that it could bring to the U.S. market.
”We’re going to have a really big improvement by the Grantley timeframe,” Guillen said, referring to the next-generation of Intel’s server processors based on Haswell microarchitecture. Those servers will come out in the third quarter of next year.
Lenovo’s enterprise strategy is predicated on the flexibility of server offerings and the company wants to offer a shopping list where customers can check mark what they need, Guillen said. That’s a different server strategy from top server makers IBM, HP and Dell, which are focusing on converged offerings that package servers, software, networking and storage.
”Even though I could have a converged system ... I bet 70 percent of the market doesn’t consume infrastructure in that manner,” Guillen said. “We think there’s a lot of technology in the supply base that’s not owned by Dell, HP and IBM that could help drive the efficiency of workloads much better.”
Buyers want flexibility in choosing their data-center technology stack instead of being stuck with proprietary technologies, Guillen said. Lenovo has partnered with software makers like Oracle, EMC, Citrix, Red Hat and Microsoft, and also established a storage joint venture last year with EMC called LenovoEMC, which supplies parts bundled with Lenovo’s servers.
At the same time, the company is “open to any technologies that drive customer value,” Guillen said, saying that integrated server offerings is on that list.
”In appropriate time we will be developing our portfolio in that area,” Guillen said.
To expand outside China, Lenovo has invested $100 million in a state-of-the-art software research and development center in Sao Paulo. It will be the company’s first research and development center dedicated to software development for the Enterprise Product Group. The development center will focus on software for server management, storage management, cloud technologies and other tools. Outside of China, the company also has enterprise product design centers in the U.S. and Taiwan.
It also doesn’t hurt to have a strong PC business, Guillen said. The ThinkPad brand and products opens the door for the company to have discussions with customers about enterprise products.
”Trusted relationships, years of being a valued supplier, they trust us,” Guillen said.
But Lenovo has to build a reputation as a reliable server vendor and it faces competition from a bunch of smaller server makers such as Supermicro and Quanta, analysts said.
Lenovo’s biggest challenge will be to quickly attain scale as there is a lot of volume in industry-standard x86 servers, said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.
”I could see a scenario where Lenovo could be a low-cost provider of the newest technology with good quality and an enterprise brand. Lenovo has a lot of work to do, but they have some very experienced enterprise veterans,” Moorhead said.
Lenovo’s products may not require the amount of support as integrated or dense servers from IBM, HP and Dell. But in rack servers, enterprise customers are looking for top quality and good service, which ThinkPads have delivered, Moorhead said.
”What Lenovo needs now is a cadre of enterprise testimonials saying that they trust Lenovo in servers,” Moorhead said.
With the enterprise business, Lenovo is today where Dell was four to five years ago, said Charles King, principal analyst and Pund-IT.
”Dell did a similar transformation and said it was going to be an end-to-end computer vendor. People laughed at the time, but they are doing well now,” King said.
Lenovo has a solid collection of x86 servers and is working closely with partners in networking and storage, particular EMC. The company is not an IBM or HP and has to build a reputation on support, but a flexible server approach is a good start, King said.
”Lenovo is going to have to pick its spot and go after them one after another,” King said.