At the Huawei Cloud Summit at GITEX Global 2024, Hu Yuhai, Vice President of Huawei Hybrid Cloud, announced the release of Huawei Cloud Stack 8.5, Huawei’s latest hybrid cloud version, for the Middle East and Central Asia.
Huawei Cloud Stack 8.5 aims to create a superior hybrid cloud in the AI era to accelerate industrial intelligence.
The Huawei Cloud Stack Forum for Middle East was also held at GITEX Global 2024.”Huawei Cloud Stack provides a superior hybrid cloud for government and enterprise customers in the Middle East and Central Asia through more powerful cloud infrastructure, more diverse cloud services, and more extensive industry solutions. Currently, Huawei Cloud Stack provides more than 120 on-premises cloud services and 50 industry scenario-specific solutions. In the future, we will continue to invest in the hybrid cloud market and work with customers and partners to leap to new horizons and accelerate industrial intelligence. “
Hu Yuhai, Vice President of Huawei Hybrid Cloud
Huawei Cloud Stack 8.5 Unveiled: A Leap to New Horizons Across the Middle East and Central Asia
Cloud computing plays a crucial role in driving Digital Transformation in the Middle East, with two clear trends emerging: first, the deployment of AI solutions based on cloud technology will significantly enhance the performance and efficiency of Artificial Intelligence.
Second, there is a noticeable trend towards cloud-native adoption and moving core applications to the cloud.
In recent years, cloud computing adoption in the Middle East has increased significantly. According to IDC research data, approximately 20% of enterprises in the Middle East and Africa are already using cloud technology to implement AI solutions, while an additional 25% of organisations plan to adopt cloud-based AI solutions within the next 12 months. Cloud will become the preferred deployment model for AI solutions, requiring scalable infrastructure to meet growing demands for computing power and data storage.
In response to this demand, Hu Yuhai, Vice President of Huawei Hybrid Cloud, unveiled Huawei Cloud Stack 8.5, the latest version, at the Huawei Cloud Summit. He also introduced some new cutting-edge technologies and solutions in this new version, including the Seamless Cloud OS Upgrade, Security Anti-Ransomware Solution, Mainframe-to-Cloud Solution and Hybrid Cloud for Large AI Models.
Roy Luo, Director of Cloud Consulting Solution Sales Dept, Huawei Cloud Middle East and Central Asia, said: “Huawei Cloud Stack is the first of its kind, combining intelligent hybrid cloud technology with continuous innovation. It integrates seamlessly with public cloud services, allowing us to continuously download and synchronise successful advancements from the public cloud to on-premises environments. This provides customers with the most advanced cloud services and a strong ecosystem.
“We have three main advantages. Firstly, we prioritise security and reliability in our cloud infrastructure while maintaining openness. This ensures that we can work with mainstream IT hardware vendors to provide diverse computing power capabilities.
“Secondly, we introduce advanced data and AI convergence technologies on this platform. This allows customers to easily utilise AI and Big Data technologies.
“Thirdly, we aim to help industry customers own and develop their large language models. With our recent release of the Pangu model, we empower customers to maintain AI and data sovereignty within their data centres, fostering innovation.”
More Powerful Cloud Infrastructure
Huawei Cloud Stack has been stepping up efforts to innovate core technologies, striving to provide customers with an infrastructure platform excelling in reliability, performance and resource utilisation. The new version introduces two major updates:
- Seamless cloud OS upgrade: Traditional virtualisation upgrades require migrating virtual machines from physical servers before performing the upgrade, and the process is sequential, resulting in a very long upgrade cycle. To help customers address this challenge, Huawei Cloud Stack, based on a modular hypervisor architecture, provides in-place, seamless OS upgrades. This technology has been used by a financial customer, reducing the upgrade time for a cluster with 1,200 nodes from 21 days to five hours.
- Ransomware defence: In 2023, ransomware attacks surged by 67% globally with projected losses exceeding $30 billion. In response to ransomware attacks, Huawei Cloud Stack offers a comprehensive protection plan, covering 100% of known ransomware and utilising AI for intelligent detection of unknown ransomware. It also leverages collaboration among server, network and storage backups for more thorough defence. This cloud-native security architecture – with one security operations centre and seven layers of protection – is helping organisations to transform security from passive response to proactive defence.
More Diverse Cloud Services
Huawei Cloud Stack 8.5 provides more than 120 cloud services, including big data, database, blockchain, AI and other cutting-edge services. In the new version, GaussDB has been upgraded in terms of hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP), data compression and compatibility. Huawei Cloud Stack leverages Pangu Models 5.0, which was recently released, to deploy large AI model capabilities on the hybrid cloud, helping enterprises build their own custom large AI models in one stop. From the hardware layer to the software layer and then to the model layer, it provides comprehensive AI production capabilities, significantly simplifying the adoption of large AI models.
“According to the Gartner Hype Cycle, AI has become a necessary component for organisations to deploy. For successful AI and Big Data applications, you need a solid foundation, which is where Huawei Hybrid Cloud comes in. By deploying a hybrid cloud, you can leverage cloud technology either on-premises or in the public cloud,” said Luo.
“Secondly, it’s crucial to ensure data and AI sovereignty when it comes to AI innovation. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve developed and released the industry’s first intelligent hybrid cloud tailored for the Middle East market. This cloud provides a data and AI computing platform, alongside the Pangu model and other AI models. It also offers an AI development pipeline that simplifies AI innovation and makes data management more efficient.”
More Extensive Industry Solutions
Drawing on extensive industry expertise, Huawei Cloud Stack 8.5 offers over 50 scenario-specific solutions across six major sectors. The solutions include the Mainframe-to-Cloud Solution for the finance sector, National Government Cloud, and cloud transformation of carriers’ in-house workloads. These solutions are designed to expedite Digital Transformation and promote intelligent upgrade. This year, Huawei established a mainframe modernisation business unit (BU), integrating core R&D resources, promoting systematic innovation, and addressing the challenges of moving core services from mainframes to the cloud. They are dedicated to creating highly available, easy-to-maintain, and more agile open new core systems for customers.
According to the latest survey conducted by Omdia, a world-renowned consultancy firm, Huawei Cloud has become a key player in the hybrid cloud market of the Middle East. The survey placed Huawei Cloud Stack in the leadership group for categories such as infrastructure, cloud architecture and AI capabilities. Huawei Cloud Stack achieved top ranking for being proactive in optimising cloud service experience, for suitability in training AI workloads, and for cloud service reliability. Omdia predicts that government organisations and enterprises across the Middle East will be eager for rapid private cloud and hybrid cloud adoption. Huawei Cloud Stack’s leading solutions and compliance with local regulations are expected to drive further adoption.
“In the Middle Eastern region, the digital economy is booming, and everyone is talking about Digital Transformation, digital operations and intelligence upgrades,” said Luo.
“We aim to share our global successes with this region by bringing industry-specific solutions to businesses across Central Asia, particularly in sectors such as the finance and telecommunications sectors.”
