Huawei unveils the Active-Active data centres where no downtime is acceptable
Our world has never been more connected than it is today. Emails, SMS, Tweets, Posts fly across the globe at a blink of an eye and instantly accessible by billions of people, on every continent, in every language from both a fixed location and even while on the move.
Each one of us is both a consumer and a producer of information. We are said that by the year 2015 each person will create 1 GB of data per day which forces companies to re-evaluate their data processing capabilities.
As a guest of Huawei I attended the Huawei Cloud Congress in China to understand the impact that Big Data has on today’s business.
Traditional Networking is dead
Traditional infrastructure is not able to cope with the massive amount of data being encountered and Enterprises are forced to evolve from post-processing large data sets to real-time processing of information. This transition requires an intelligent network, sophisticated Cloud Storage centre and powerful Cloud Computing processing power – these are the blueprint trends for the next-generation network architecture where no downtime is accepted.
Large organisation can have fault-tolerance solutions in case of failure. This includes having an entire standby Disaster Recovery (DR) site, however this is usually a site that is seldom used as the main site hardly breaks to the extreme that requires a cut-over to the DR site. IT administrators are reluctant to switch over to the DR site as they are unsure of the performance and stability of the standby hardware. Therefore a cut-over to the DR site is rare something which frustrates the company’s CFO who spent the IT budget on what is essentially a dud-site.
Active-Active is alive
To solve this wasted resource issue, Huawei Enterprise launched the Active-Active Data Centre solution. This solution allows for the business to have all the advantages of a DR site but still utilising its processing power during the company’s regular operation. Therefore, the site changes from a purely a “sometimes used site” to an active part of the network.
The Active-Active system writes data simultaneously to both data centres and therefore the data is always in synch so in case of an emergency there is no downtime nor any loss of data as the business continues to operate as normal. The Cloud bases applications are also replicated across both data centres.
R&D is key
Huawei has taken their years of networking and telecommunications expertise and has built the system from the ground up deploying various solutions in 170 countries serving one-third of the world’s population.
In the carrier networking and enterprise fields, Huawei’s sales revenue grew from $21.5 billion in 2009 to $39.5 billion in 2013. This massive growth is said to be due to the large investment that Huawei has made in its Research and Development which consists of 70 000 staff making up 45% of Huawei’s total employees worldwide. Huawei’s total R&D expenses totalled $5.54 billion in 2013 resulting in filing 44,168 patents in China and 18, 791 patent abroad – 90% of which are invention patents.
