The need for intelligent storage and computing is growing as AI puts pressure on infrastructure, leaving organisation increasingly reconsidering how they store, manage, protect and use data, says information and communication technology group Huawei Enterprise Business Group in South Africa CEO Kui Zheng.

In line with this, Huawei focuses on data protection to help keep businesses running during cyber threats or infrastructure failures; data centre virtualisation to improve performance while reducing overheads; AI computing to unlock new insights and efficiency; and smart office tools to support more connected collaboration.

During Huawei’s IT Day, held in Johannesburg in April, the company showcased OceanStor Dorado as its flagship storage platform for mission-critical workloads.

“As AI and the token economy grow, so does the amount of data that organisations have to handle. This, in turn, puts extra pressure on enterprise infrastructure,” explains Huawei Advanced Storage Solutions Group technical director Naveen Kumar.

He points out that the new- generation OceanStor Dorado is designed to meet those demands by improving performance, supporting storage area network, or SAN, network attached storage, or NAS, and simple storage service, or S3, in one system, and strengthening the security needed for critical enterprise environments.

Huawei Enterprise data centre solution department solution architect Clinton George adds that Huawei’s answer to modern data centre demands is a full stack data centre virtualisation solution (DCS).

“More than just a hypervisor, DCS offers easy deployment, unified management, AI, a big data platform and optimised compute-network-storage collaboration, delivering performance, resilience, ransomware protection, backup and a migration tool that has helped over 1 200 customers in the past two years.”

Huawei further highlights its Atlas AI computing portfolio, focused on the growing infrastructure demands created by enterprise AI adoption.

The rise of AI-native applications and the token economy is driving demand for more computing power, explains Huawei Southern Africa computing marketing and solution department director Allen Ye.

“Inference demand is expected to grow faster than training over the next five years, catch up this year, and reach 4.5 times last year’s level by 2030.”

Huawei showcased scenario- based AI practices currently applied in public services, finance and electric power industries, and demonstrated how AI can create value based on specific scenarios.

Huawei also showcased Atlas 850E&950 SuperPoD, next- generation AI computing architecture for larger AI workloads.

It can scale to 8 192 neural processing units, or NPUs, and support trillion-parameter model training, while its interconnection and UnifiedBus technology help ease the bandwidth, latency and bottleneck problems that often come with traditional clusters.

Meanwhile, Huawei Intelligent Collaboration solution architect James Kamau Maina outlines IdeaHub as the workhorse of the modern meeting room and a key part of the company’s AI Classroom push.

Large deployments can be managed through IdeaManager, which handles configuration and diagnostics at scale.

“IdeaHub supports wireless projection without requiring devices to be on the same network. Up to 40 devices can be connected at once and nine projecting simultaneously. It also includes eye-protection features.”

Huawei South Africa data centre solution sales department director Lu Peng also highlights OceanClub, a global non-profit technical community focused on data storage exchange and collaborative problem solving.

Organisations are already using Huawei technologies in real-world environments to modernise operations, including Altron Digital Business.

“The partnership between Altron and Huawei focuses on helping South African businesses build stronger technology infrastructure. The partnership, which now spans 14 years, is supported by 91 Huawei engineers across South Africa and has delivered more than R5-billion in project value,” explains Altron Digital Business solution sales data centre specialist Aadhir Maharaj.

“That kind of footprint matters at a time when businesses are under growing pressure to turn AI ambition into real operational value.”