Huawei Champions AI-Ready Data Infrastructure at IDI Forum in Johannesburg

The 2024 Huawei Innovative Data Infrastructure (IDI) Forum in Sandton, Johannesburg, was a landmark event for tech enthusiasts and industry experts, particularly with the enlightening keynote address by Diego Xiao, Huawei Data Storage Product Line's Vice President. Xiao's presentation, centered on "Data Awakening: Building Leading AI-Ready Data Infrastructure," provided deep insights into the firm’s pioneering “1+3+X” architecture which consists of a unified data lake, three distinct data pools, and a range of data services (X).

Xiao emphasized that this sophisticated infrastructure is a vital tool for businesses to extract maximum value from their data stacks, propelling an intelligent leap forward for the digital economy in Sub-Saharan Africa. With the advent of generative AI and its wide-ranging applications in various industries - from finance and public services to telecommunication carriers - an AI-ready data ecosystem has never been more pertinent.

In a compelling success narrative, Xiao highlighted how a prominent Asian banking institution dramatically improved its operational efficiency by implementing Huawei's OceanStor storage solution. The AI-integrated system achieves significant time savings in call center operations, expedited loan processing, and near-instant fraud detection - a testament to the power of agile data management and utilization in the AI era.

Expanding on the need for these robust data solutions, Xiao articulated that enterprises should embrace an architecture offering high performance, massive capacity, and stringent data protection, encompassed in Huawei's data infrastructure innovations. Huawei's OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage series was showcased for its unwavering reliability and ground-breaking disk-controller collaboration algorithm, which can quintuple file access performance, supporting the continuous flow of core services.

Huawei also caters to the AI-specific demands with the OceanStor A800 high-performance storage, pioneering in its bandwidth and IOPS capabilities, and uniquely designed to support extensive AI services across numerous industries. Meanwhile, the OceanStor Pacific Storage series confronts the explosion of unstructured data by supporting a variety of protocols without the need for data migration, boasting remarkable energy efficiency and unparalleled capacity density.

In addressing the critical issue of cybersecurity in an AI-dominated landscape, Xiao introduced Huawei's OceanProtect X and E series for end-to-end data protection. Their backup and recovery bandwidths, coupled with a best-in-industry data reduction ratio, offer substantial savings and heightened security against cyber threats.

For comprehensive data management across multiple locations, Huawei provides the Omni-Dataverse - a global file system in the DME that nurtures a holistic data lake and elevates metadata management across Huawei's storage devices, ensuring that regional enterprise data assets remain visible and maneuverable.

An innovative feature unveiled at the forum was Huawei's DataMaster, an AI model for IT Operation and Maintenance (O&M). This model streamlines O&M by analyzing logs to preempt issues, generating reports, and executing O&M tasks efficiently, and will be integrated into Huawei’s DME Data Centre Management platform.

To conclude, Diego Xiao reiterated Huawei's dedication to overcoming customer challenges and responding to the needs of the industry in this data awakening era. Huawei's compelling strategy is equipped to harness the untapped potential of digitalisation and intelligence within Sub-Saharan Africa, creating a future-ready AI-driven data infrastructure.