China’s Huawei Technologies has launched new database and storage products with the aim of redefining its data infrastructure and strengthening the global presence of its cloud business. The world’s first AI-native database GaussDB supports differentiated scenarios such as private and public clouds and data services in the finance, internet, logistics and automotive sectors. Huawei’s FusionStorage 8.0 is claimed to be the industry’s best-performing distributed storage solution for supporting enterprise applications.
“Humanity is entering the age of an intelligent world,” said David Wang, Huawei Executive Director of the Board and President of ICT Strategy and Marketing. “Data is the new factor of production, and intelligence the new productivity. Heterogeneous, intelligent, and converged databases will become the key data infrastructure of the financial, government, and telecoms industries.”
With this new database management product, the Shenzhen-based company marks its official entry into the database field and places itself in direct competition with established foreign cloud vendors such as IBM, Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft. Huawei, best known for making smartphones and telecom equipment, will employ its AI-native cloud database to improve tuning performance by over 60 percent.
Wang said, “AI-Native database GaussDB will help enhance Huawei Cloud’s capabilities and fully unleash the power of diversified computing, which includes x86, ARM, GPU, and NPU computing. We aim to continuously push our AI strategy forward and foster a complete computing ecosystem. Together with our partners, we will move further towards the intelligent world.”
According to a Huawei executive, the company is also following higher standards and stricter rules compared to its counterparts in protecting user data, as data security is fundamental to the database storage business. “We only provide technologies to support data processing and transmission, and we do not own the data,” Wang said. “Some have confused this technical issue as an ideological issue, and labeling a country or a company a national security risk will not help tackle the global network security challenge”.
As stated in the announcement, Huawei’s GaussDB and FusionInsight big data solutions have been deployed in 60 countries and regions, assisting over 1,500 customers and more than 500 business partners in different industries. Furthermore, Huawei Cloud has launched 13 database services, including data warehouse services on the cloud for industry customers. Huawei FusionStorage was the market leader according to the IDC’s software-defined storage market share report in 2018.
