Huawei Cloud Stack gives Africa’s regulated sectors cloud benefits, on-premises

Roc Bai, VP of Huawei Cloud Southern Africa.
Roc Bai, VP of Huawei Cloud Southern Africa.

Many highly regulated enterprises seeking the capabilities of the cloud have been slow to do so, due to concerns about data security and sovereignty. Huawei Cloud has addressed these concerns with the Huawei Cloud Stack, which is gaining traction across Africa.

The Huawei Cloud Stack was highlighted at Huawei Africa Connect 2024, a two-day showcase of Huawei’s capabilities in Sandton.

Huawei Cloud Stack is an on-premises solution that delivers the benefits of the cloud within the secure enterprise environment.

Roc Bai, VP of Huawei Cloud Southern Africa, described the Huawei Cloud Stack as "the preferred cloud for African industry digitisation".

“African enterprises face several challenges, especially with regards to data sovereignty,” he says. “They want to transform and move from siloed, legacy platforms and achieve stable and localised infrastructure with end-to-end security. The Huawei Cloud Stack is the best choice to meet these needs.”

Benefits of the cloud, in-house

Khan Shiek, presales director at Huawei Cloud South Africa, explains: “We install the hardware infrastructure at customers’ premises, where they can achieve all the performance, scalability and cost benefits of the cloud. Huawei Cloud offers local support, and a free customer training and certification programme to ensure their cloud environment delivers optimal benefits.”

He says Huawei Cloud Stack outperforms competitors on cost, support and features. “We offer highly competitive pricing, with a saving of 30% to 50%, with over 110 cloud services in 13 categories – more than other hyperscalers can offer,” he says.

Huawei Cloud Stack also offers enhanced capabilities for AI, industrial internet, data circulation and software development, and notably, Huawei’s Pangu pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for multiple sectors.

A better way to database

Among the many Huawei Cloud Stack value propositions are Huawei’s AI-native GaussDB, an enterprise-grade distributed relational database featuring high scalability, robust performance and high reliability. GaussDB decouples storage and compute for scalability, improved performance and an enhanced user experience.

With a distributed architecture, GaussDB supports petabytes of storage and contains more than 1 000 nodes per DB instance. It is highly available, secure and scalable and provides services including quick deployment, backup, restoration, monitoring and alarm reporting for enterprises.

GaussDB can be deployed in Huawei Cloud, Huawei Cloud Stack or a lightweight architecture. It supports multi-tenancy and data compression, and can reduce storage costs by up to 50% and improve resource utilisation by over four times.

Mark Wang, Solution Architect of Huawei Cloud Southern Africa, notes: “Around 60% of IT investment today is in databases, and this investment is growing as databases become increasingly important for delivering on SLAs and customer experience.”

In a centralised database with a shared disk, performance bottlenecks can occur, he says.

“We see more and more enterprises looking to reduce costs and improve performance, which is why we believe high performance, highly reliable distributed database technology like GaussDB will replace centralised databases,” he says.

Huawei Cloud Southern Africa notes that its range of solutions and cloud models is enabling African enterprises to "leap to cloud to accelerate industrial intelligence".

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