back to article Huawei: Hey, storage bigshots – we're coming for your top 3 spot

China is coming to shake up our cosy storage world, with Huawei hoping for a top three supplier spot by 2018. Fan Ruiqi, Huawei’s storage products president, told Reuters: “We don't want to just be number one in China ... We want to be at least the top three in the world by 2018” in the storage business. That means acquiring …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Buy Chinese storage...

    First off the days of huge monolithic storage arrays are over, save for a few fringe use cases like MVS or high end unix attached systems.

    The rest of the workloads are all going to software based HCI providers or an SDS type software only play on commodity hardware.

    Anyone that thinks otherwise will find themselves in the same boat as Violin et al.

    1. Lusty

      Re: Buy Chinese storage...

      Yes, the SDS marketing does say that. Those of us with experience, however, realise that proper storage has requirements SDS cannot and will not meet. Yes, for standard workloads it may erode a bit, and the old monolithic systems which tried to cover a whole enterprise in one box will die off. Realistically, Huawei will more likely kill off the HP, Dell, Pure, and others which are generic boxes with disks in them - that's what Huawei are great at and it's commodity. They'll find it harder to compete with NetApp and EMC who have other value. SDS could easily be killed by this too as Huawei could be significantly cheaper.

      For future reference, no serious enterprise uses commodity hardware, you're falling for marketing nonsense. If you buy HP servers they are still proprietary and have a profit margin. Commodity means building yourself, and that means high cost and no support if you're doing it at small scale.

      1. Brady's left foot

        Re: Buy Chinese storage...

        People and maintenance are by far the biggest factors in Storage TCO.

        People cost will increase.

        Maintenance will be spread amongst multiple vendors, may not increase (although I suspect it will) but will be more painful to manage, one factor increasing people cost.

        Life-cycle management will be trickier, at least in the short term, another factor increasing people cost.

        *Good* monitoring tools are essential (and not cheap), but show me how many are available for SDS platforms on commodity storage, fine I can put an enterprise systems management agent on my farm (ah...there's a hidden cost) that allows be to monitor processes and syslogs (more work to understand what the messages mean, work out their impact, and flag appropriately. So people cost to build and maintain the monitoring and a lot of frequent checking just in case the in-house code breaks.

        Securing the estate effectively? *Shudder*, even after stripping out excess packages on the OS platform of choice Malicious code closing processes. Data breach anyone? OK, most storage runs on a custom built Linux platform these days, so there's an argument that the risk is there as well, but someone's already thought about the security and made sure it's applied across the estate.

        All of these concerns can be solved, but at what cost?

        At scale, with rock-solid processes, and a support contract it might be effective but security will always be a concern, and who wants to lie awake at night wondering about that?

    2. Hatless Pemberty
      Mushroom

      Sin Eaters

      Maybe for puny amounts of storage. Once you pass the PB mark (which nowdays is hardly anything to write home about) you no longer pay for hardware, you pay for service (aka, covering your own arse).

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fusion Storage anyone?

    Before anyone dismisses Huawei as a hardware only vendor they do have a software scale out storage solution already well into the PB mark on reference sites (confusingly branded as Fusion Storage). So I'm guessing the likes of vSAN and scaleIO are firmly in the cross hairs!

    I'm just saying... you may want to watch this space...

    My fridge is already a Huawei, so nothing would surprise me...

    1. Lusty

      Re: Fusion Storage anyone?

      Thanks for pointing that out (why A/C on such a reasonable post?). I actually had assumed they were planning to blast us with cheap hardware like they do in other markets and didn't bother to Google :)

  3. 尼尔

    I know it's not quite the same thing, but since I came to China 3 years ago I signed up for a couple of the free cloud services.

    Wei Yun is from the people who run Wechat; they give me 10TB free.

    The second 360 Yun Pan who give a staggering 36TB free!

    Both of these work great on computers or phones,

    They seem to have different ideas about cloud here.

  4. toughluck

    May I ask for slightly smaller and more compressed badly exposed graphs and charts next time? The top one is almost completely illegible, but I can still just about make out a couple of words on it, but I'm mostly abel to decipher the bottom one -- sloppy job.

    If I may, here are a couple of suggestions: make sure the image is not in focus and make sure that you shake your hands a bit when taking the picture to make it all blurry.

    Thanks a ton in advance.

  5. garyblack

    I sold Huawei Storage for a while and my experience was as follows:

    1: Forget most US owned Enterprises, they will simply not allow a Chinese product anywhere near them, and to get anything like a top 3 spot, Huawei will need to sell into the US where they are banned from supplying Telecoms providers. That's going to be a big ask.

    2: If a company has a budget for $1m they can afford a Tier 1 vendor. It's the old " you don't get fired for buying IBM" scenario.

    3: For Huawei (or indeed any challenger to the big incumbents), to persuade customers away from buying what they know and trust, there needs to be a competitive advantage, i.e price.

    Unfortunately, in my experience, Huawei simply isn't cheap enough. The perception is that Chinese = cheap and Huawei is typically 25-30% cheaper than a tier 1. The need to be more like 50%.

    4: If a company is persuaded away from buying a Storage product from a tier 1, there are other options they will probably look at first. In Networking, my experience was that a prospect persuaded to look away from Cisco would then turn to Brocade, F10 or Arista before thinking about Huawei.

    5: Huawei support used to be distinctly lacking. Unless they've changed, they need to seriously sharpen up their act because the attitude is too much "sell and forget".

    This isn't the first time Huawei have made such bold proclamations of market share, but the fact is that these claims are usually made by big-hitting Chinese managers who have come out of their Telecoms business where Huawei is a top 3 player and they think they can achieve the same in other product areas, and they make these claims because Huawei senior management expect them to make them!

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