Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, today announced the first South African launch of its next generation CloudEngine series data centre switches at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Cape Town. These innovative CloudEngine Series switches have by far the highest forwarding performance in the industry and provides reliable and secure services to customers allowing them to build a stable network architecture.

The cloud computing era is evolving rapidly, posing added challenges for enterprise organizations such as the unprecedented levels of increase in network traffic, mass migration of virtual machines and the convergence of contrasting network types. To address these challenges, Huawei has pioneered the development of a “change-on-demand” data centre network approach, enabling customers to build a network that is elastic, easy-to-use and open.

According to research by Forrester, cloud service revenue is expected to increase by 10 times to $132 billion by 2020. At the same time, cloud data is expected to grow to 35 zettabytes, while server interface capacity will see a 100 times increase to reach 100GE [Source: IDC].

Mr. Lauren Fan, President of Huawei Enterprise Business Group for East and Southern Africa said “A scalable data centre network is integral to the business success of enterprises in order to adapt to fast-evolving ICT trends. Drawing on our extensive R&D expertise and industry standards collaboration work, we are excited to be launching the CloudEngine series which will provide enterprises with that flexibility and bring greater benefits to our customers.”

Designed for data centres and enterprise campuses, the new CloudEngine series switches are especially suitable for businesses including ISPs (Internet Service Providers), carriers, and organisations from vertical industries including the finance, transportation, government, utilities and education sectors. They help enterprises build a scalable, virtualized and converged data centre fabric, resulting in high scalability, high performance, high reliability, energy savings and effectively reduced TCO (Total Cost of Operations).

Huawei Enterprise’s CloudEngine series switches provide the industry’s largest single-frame switching capacity (of up to 48TB and support high-density switching of 100GE, 40GE, 10GE and GE interfaces), as well as virtualization and computing, storage and network convergence. This enables the sustainable development of enterprise data centres over a 10-year span.

“Huawei’s data centre solutions have been deployed across many countries in Africa.” said Fan “We have had successful deployment for the Senegal, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda. In all these cases, we have provided our customers with solutions that meet their business needs, resulting in greater ease in information sharing, high performance, reliable network experience improved storage system and significant reductions in energy consumption.”

As one of the top ICT companies in IP, mobile and fixed networks, over the past 20 years, Huawei has grown from being an equipment provider to being an industry-leading network provider, mobile device developer and now a leading partner for enterprise businesses. Huawei plays an active role in the research and development of industry standards, including data centre network standards. Huawei currently participates in 148 international standards organisations, including IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), and has submitted over 25,000 standard proposals.

To date, Huawei Enterprise has the most comprehensive data centre network product portfolio in the industry.  Huawei Enterprise is one of the few vendors which can provide end-to-end data centre solutions ranging from basic infrastructure to disaster recovery to security as well as data centre management.