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The Huawei Middle East IT Day 2022, held under the theme of ‘Green Data, Super Power’, recently brought together Huawei experts, independent analysts and customers to discuss the role of modern data centre and storage technology in helping businesses innovate faster.
Digitalisation is accelerating in the region, putting pressure on existing IT systems. This has led to a surge in demand for agile, scalable and cost-effective all-flash storage that can deliver on digital transformation needs better than traditional storage systems.
Addressing the summit, Steven Yi, president for Middle East & Africa, Huawei, said countries in the Middle East and Africa are keen to adopt new technologies, as we have seen with the fast development of 5G in the region. “We will continue to work with our customers and partners to lead the next wave of digital transformation and drive the national transformation visions,” he said.
Other keynote speakers at IT Day included Bill Raftery, VP of Storage Solutions, Huawei, whose speech titled, ‘Redefining all-flash data centre’ emphasised the importance of innovative technologies such as flash-based storage platforms and how they enable organisations to accelerate digital transformation. He also stressed the applicability of Huawei’s pioneered technology in different verticals such as tax/finance and oil and gas.
The event also featured the release of a white paper titled “The trend of data-intensive HPC (high-performance computing)”. The report captures insights into the rapidly evolving requirements placed on the HPC ecosystem by the growth in the adoption of data-intensive applications and workloads.
Early adopters of all-flash storage have already experienced the transformative power of this technology.
Sim S. Lim, group executive, Consumer Banking & Wealth Management, DBS Bank, took participants through the bank’s digitalisation journey.
“At DBS, we are re-imagining and re-investing in the latest ICT solutions to digitally empower our customers and build an ecosystem of trust and collaboration,” he said.
Fahem Al Nuaimi, CEO of Ankabut, shared insights on building an Intelligent Full-Stack Data Centre in the UAE. He said, “An intelligent full-stack data center enables us to offer digitalized education services, making the academic process more efficient while boosting collaboration.”
The financial industry is among the most important markets for modern storage based on the need to digitalise the customer journey, stringent data handling requirements and the need for robust cybersecurity.
A roundtable session titled “The future of the financial sector — IT driven digital transformation” focused on this sector and attracted IT leaders from some of the region’s leading banks.
Wilson Xavier, ICT research director, IDC META, was also one of the many distinguished speakers. He highlighted industry trends for storage and data center, noting, “The enterprise DataSphere share of global data volume will increase to 68 per cent by 2025, and data management strategies can either make or break IT modernisation.”
Liu Gui, vice-president of Marketing and Solution Sales, Enterprise Business Group, Huawei Middle East, closed the day by launching the Huawei Flash Track Promotion program, which can deliver storage devices sooner and help customers deploy IT resources quickly and implement projects faster.
All industries urgently need to prepare for the digital economy. But they also need costs and energy consumption to come down. Huawei’s all-flash data center solutions present a faster, greener, and more reliable solution for enterprises to better and more cost-effectively manage data. They also significantly improve intelligent management as the flash disk life can be monitored and predicted. And, with enough flexibility, they provide optimal latency for workloads, leading to improved customer experience, shorter deployment times, and a much lower frequency of latency issues.
Currently, Huawei has 12 R&D centres, over 4,000 R&D personnel, and 3000 patents dedicated to storage, helping more than 15,000 customers in over 150 countries. Huawei data storage ranks No. 3 worldwide and has achieved Gartner recognition for more than five years. Huawei’s all-flash storage solution OceanStor Dorado has also been chosen by the “Gartner Peer Insights” for “Best Customers’ Choice”.
