Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays 2016

Huawei

Huawei is a technology conglomerate with a comprehensive portfolio of storage solutions that includes mid range and high-end hybrid and solid-state SAN storage arrays, and scale-out NAS storage. Huawei has leveraged its large telecom industry presence to develop solutions that cater to industries such as video surveillance and media and entertainment. It is one of the few storage vendors that manufactures both SSDs and controllers, and is willing to leverage this to lower SSD prices. It has been aggressive in promoting SSD-based configurations to its existing customer base, as a replacement to hybrid configurations. In September 2015, Huawei entered the software-defined storage market with the introduction of OceanStor DJ, an SDS controller that aggregates multiple storage systems and provides storage as a service to enterprises, as well as extending on-premises to the Huawei's public cloud. Huawei continues to strategically engage with technology partners for sourcing and co-development opportunities in areas such as NAND flash and large-capacity disks. China, the second largest consumer of enterprise storage globally, continues to generate the majority of Huawei's revenue, although it is increasingly being challenged by emerging and local vendors in the region.

Strenghts   •   Huawei has been able to consistently address customer needs by delivering products that address hybrid, flash, SDS and hybrid storage requirements.   

 •   Huawei supports Mode 2 enterprise requirements by supporting OpenStack and Apache Hadoop, as well as container technologies such as Docker. 

   •   Software licensing is made simple as Huawei offers an option to consume data services as a bundle. 

Cautions

   •   Geopolitical situations continue to hamper Huawei's ability to sell in North America, which may concern some enterprises in the region.  

  •   Many enterprise customers do not consider Huawei an innovative company because of ineffective marketing. 

   •   Huawei has fewer tier 1 global system integration partners relative to its competitors, thus reducing enterprise customer exposure to its storage product portfolio.