Huawei has been named the winner of the prestigious Best Business Application Cloud Platform Award for its FusionCube cloud solution at the Cloud Africa World Forum held at the Maslow Hotel, in Johannesburg. The Cloud World Forum Africa is the continent’s largest cloud and ICT event for enterprise and telecom professionals.

As the principal sponsor of the event, Huawei showcased its FusionCube solution to demonstrate the evolution and reconstruction of the telecom industry in the cloud era, and to share insights on how cloud technology and network virtualisation will provide the biggest opportunities and challenges for operators going forward.

Huawei’s FusionCube is an IT infrastructure for virtualisation platforms, data warehouses, desktop clouds, data centres, and high-performance computing platform applications.

Designed based on an open architecture, Huawei’s FusionCube integrates blade servers, distributed storage devices, and switches as well as a virtualisation platform, and cloud management software into one 12 U sub-rack. It also supports on-demand resource allocation and scale-out. It is the world’s first cloud infrastructure appliance that truly achieves deep consolidation of computing, storage, network, and management.

Whereas normal service rollout usually takes a few months, Huawei’s FusionCube can enable enterprises to reduce this lead time to just several days. Due to its converged platform, the FusionCube greatly simplifies system operation and management (O&M). From switches to virtual machines (VMs), from storage to applications, and from configuration to automation and then to security – all these can be easily managed on a single portal.

This greatly facilitates system deployments and decreases O&M costs.

Be it for public or private cloud environments that provide IT/application hosting services, the FusionCube offers customers a highly simplified, one-stop cloud infrastructure platform. It also businesses considerable benefits should they wish to expand the capacity of existing data centres.

Huawei provides cloud solution platform infrastructures in the form of computing, storage, networks, platform software and engineering design, as well as cloud application solutions for the conversion of traditional telecom and industry services into cloud services.

As of August 2013, Huawei successfully constructed 330 data centres worldwide, including 70 cloud data centres, and enabled over 260 cloud computing customers around the world to explore the business value of cloud technology with Huawei. In addition, Huawei deployed the world’s largest and most complicated desktop cloud system for internal use, which supports approximately 100 000 users on simultaneous business operations within the company.

A few solutions have already been deployed in Ethiopia, South Africa and Kenya.

“The ICT industry has been facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities in cloud computing. Through open collaboration with our strategic partners, Huawei will continue to provide innovative end-to-end cloud computing solutions with the goal of supporting user requirements for our customers.

“We will continue to provide leading, differentiated products and solutions, with a goal to become an optimal partner for ICT innovation,” says Ron Raffensperger, Huawei CTO of IT Solutions.