Huawei and CommVault have cemented their partnership by signing a global alliance agreement at the Huawei Cloud Congress (HCC 2015), Shanghai. The two companies also revealed the latest set of products that their three year partnership has produced at the congress.
That the signing of the agreement was a public event indicates its importance to Huawei as they strive to become recognised as a serious player in the global cloud market, they also relaunched their cloud fabric at the same event. The two signatories on this occasion were Russell Bailey, CommVault Vice-President of Global Partnerships, and Ma Li, President of Huawei IT Data Center Solutions, attended the signing ceremony.
Two products that have been produced by the collaboration to date were showcased in Shanghai. The All-in-One solution, aimed at small to medium sized enterprise is a rack mounted backup solution using Simpana 10 and providing up to 32TB backup capacity in a single node that can be expanded to 4 nodes for a maximum of 128TB. The second is a data center level centralized backup solution also using Simpana backup software.
Huawei and Commvault – where next?
Having produced products that seem to stretch across the whole market it is interesting that the future research of the two companies will be focused on a Backup-as-a-service (BaaS) solution. In the announcement there were vague references to finding solutions for Big Data and other Cloud issues. The press release stated: “Both companies will be looking into how to transform the backup solutions with closed IT architecture into open platforms while building agile and service-driven models in backup and finding ways to “wake up” and make better use of the massive amounts of data stored on systems.”
It will be interesting to see what is meant by that. Both companies have a history of working with open source and whether there is an intention to develop products using open source software is yet to be determined. The content indexing for Simpana 10 is based on Apache Lucene and Huawei has recently become a platinum member of the Linux foundation.
Its commitment to Linux was expounded upon by Mr. Ti Gong, the President of Central Software Institute, Huawei: “Linux and open source software are the building blocks of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure. The work we do with the Linux and open source community is a strategic way we build Huawei ICT software infrastructure.
“Our commitment to The Linux Foundation is a commitment to the industry to always be pushing the limits of innovation, and be collaborating with various partners in the ecosystem.”
Conclusion
Having successfully developed two products together the future for the collaboration looks bright. Whether partnerships like this one will deliver Huawei an improved reputation in the US as a trusted global company is yet to be seen. Elsewhere in the world Huawei is still growing market share though and in partnering with a company that Gartner has recognised as being one of the foremost in its field it can only help its reputation.
How Huawei see not just this but other partnerships was summed up in a canned statement by Ma Li, “Holding fast to the Huawei-defined concepts of openness and being integrated over years, we continuously grow with partners. In the field of data center backup, the Huawei/CommVault backup solution is serving over 300 customers worldwide, including operators, educational institutions, financial organizations, government agencies, large enterprises, and medical facilities.
“The signing of this global alliance agreement between Huawei and CommVault shows a new level of technical cooperation and joint innovation reflected in our success stories. We strive to deepen joint development and promotion of backup solutions in cloud-based environments. In the future, Huawei will continue to cooperate with partners in developing industry-specific solutions and creating more values for customers. “
[…] agreement was signed during the recent Huawei cloud congress. Huawei also signed an agreement with Commvault at the same event but it does not appear that Telkomsigma will be using it as the backup software. […]