Huawei Digital Power Business Development Group‘ s Executive Riaan de Leeuw is of the opinion that “Data center demand in Africa is growing exponentially and shows no signs of slowing down”
He continuous to comment that… “this demand creates exciting opportunities for significant global hyperscale investment into Africa.”
Huawei, the global ICT giant continues to increase its investment and focus into the African data centre market. Being a global leader in datacentre infrastructure solutions, Huawei Digital Power Business Group leverage their leadership in technology to drive innovation, transformation and digitalization of the traditional data centre to highly efficient, scalable and reliable data centre solutions.
Huawei Digital Power has successfully proved their data centre expertise, which is evident in the list of accolades they have accumulated over the years. These accolades are direct results of the significant R&D investment, with more than 1300 data centre technology patents and more than 6000 engineers in their global R&D centres
Being Awarded as Data Centre Facilities Vendor of the Year at the prestigious DCS Awards 2022 – for the third consecutive year, Huawei also holds the spotlight on:
- No 1 in Prefabricated Modular Data Centre in the world for 7 years
- No 1 in Global shipments of Smart PV solutions for the last 6 years
- No 1 in Global market share in their Site Power solutions, optimized for the Telco industries
… only to list a few significant milestones.
It must be noted, however, that this industry has a variety of major challenges that all players must navigate.
Institutional challenges
Like any fast-growing industry, comes certain institutional challenges. The African continent is no different and in-fact, may even present some escalated and unique challenges as a developing region.
Some of these key challenges include:
- Availability to Utility Power and the demand of data centre operational overheads on electricity consumption
- Continuous battleground for attracting skilled expert level data centre facility staff
- The ongoing investment to map one of the largest continents in the world with secure and sustainable connectivity and peering networks
- The ability to service key geographical areas with data centre infrastructure, in a speedy, reliable, sustainable and simplified manner to ensure investment TCO and ROI
Cost efficient management of the data explosion – Data vs Information
“The ongoing investment of sub-marine fibre cable connectivity, landing in all major countries around the African coast line, simply exaggerates the data growth explosion in Africa…” de Leeuw comments.
“Although this is an amazing benefit in terms of driving long term digital economy growth in Africa, the enterprise now has to give more attention to the true ‘value’ of data in their application catalogue…”
Not all data has the same economical value in organizations and no single content hosting platform offer a ‘one-size fits all’ strategy.
More evident than ever before, CIO’s are now challenged to deeply understand their organizational priorities to intelligently analyse the value of data, and the most suitable content hosting platforms to offer cost efficient, but secure and sustainable information management. This puts focus back on the topic of Cloud vs Colo vs Edge.
Organizations are generating excessive amounts of data, but ultimately, the information derived from these pools of data is what is driving the foundation of organizational success. Data is therefore not equal to information and depending on our customer’s organizational demands, we see CTO’s and CIO’s defining multi-platform strategies.
Huawei advantage
Huawei is exceptionally well positioned to assist organizations to realize simplicity, sustainability, security, predictability and cost efficiency via its teams of experts, including a well-rounded portfolio of IT and data centre infrastructure solutions.
As organizations adopt Colo and Cloud hosting platforms, localized data centres become highly inefficient and typically become the ‘elephant in the room’ during budget reviews.
Huawei’s FusionModule turn-key modular data centre solutions offer organizations efficient, modular data centre infrastructures, scaling from micro single IT rack facilities, up to larger 48 IT Racks and beyond.
These in-door solutions not only offer customers the perfect DC modernization strategy, but market-leading delivery and installation time, Uptime Tier III /IV design ready and boasting PUE’s as low as 1.4.
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This All-in-One ideology, integrates ATSE, power distribution, UPS, cooling, monitoring, fire suppression, access control and security in a single solution – ideal for onsite DC modernization or edge applications
For enterprise level Colo and hyperscale cloud customers, predictability is a challenge, apart from being able to deliver quick, reliable and cost-effective platform services to customers. Expanding and building multi-tenant datacentres at scale is slow, costly and presents high risks in an unpredictable construction environment in Africa.
Huawei’s Prefabricated Modular Data Centers (PMDC), offers fully contained solutions, purpose built for Colo / Cloud, Government, Enterprise, Carrier and even small-scale IT environments. Simplified construction requirements offer excellent time-to-market value, again with the same all-in-one, scalable ideology, via our Fusion Module solutions.
Contact Huawei South Africa’s Digital Power Expert team for further information on the full portfolio of Data Centre Infrastructure and alternative energy solutions.
Source: My Broadband
