Data centre creating savings for Huawei
A low-cost and high-speed data centre that can support various production procedures - from labour training to mass production - may be a key to success for Huawei Technologies.
Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies, the country's largest wireless equipment maker, set up Avansys, a telecom and data power conversions provider, in 1992 to manage its data centre energy consumption. In 2001, Huawei sold Avansys to Emerson Network Power, a New York-listed energy-saving solution provider, for US$750 million while continuing to use Avansys solutions.
'Besides Huawei we also have many Chinese customers such as China Telecom, China Unicom and Netcom,' said Gene Hayden, a vice-president of Emerson Network Power Asia Pacific. 'Cost-cutting is their incentive to use our Energy Logic solution, which can help reduce up to 50 per cent overall data centre power consumption.'
The Energy Logic solution involves practices and technologies such as hardware usage, monitoring functions and a server management software that ensures power efficiency. It also includes cooling practices and enclosure practices so that equipment is operating optimally.
Mr Hayden said he was counting on the opening of the mainland's 3G market to raise sales for the company by at least 45 per cent this year, compared with an annual growth rate of 20 per cent in the past three years. 'Many investment banks are using our solutions as they require critical calculation ability from software.'
Another technology for Huawei to save on data centre investment is virtualisation or 'thin-computing,' by which an enterprise can store software and data in a data centre and deliver the applications to desktops and servers across provinces.
Citrix Systems, a Nasdaq-listed company that provides virtualisation services, will double its mainland staff to 60 by the end of this year to meet fast-growing demand.
Victor Tsao, a vice-president and general manager of Greater China for Citrix Systems, which counts among its clients Huawei, Alibaba.com, Sina.com, China Mobile and Hangzhou Electric Power, described virtualisation as 'probably the best solution'.
'It is a waste of time and hard drive space for a company to install all the software in each desktop.'
Mr Tsao said the technology was mostly used in human resources training and serving customers.
'Virtualisation is mostly used in training centres, which need to update software very frequently. Through this technology, China Mobile can help a customer in a rural area open an account within seconds, compared with half an hour before.'
3G factor
Emerson Network achieves average annual sales growth of 20 per cent
With introduction of 3G on the mainland it expects sales growth to accelerate to 45%
