Huawei expands cloud capacity in Europe and has new storage models

At its European home trade fair in Madrid, Huawei announced another availability zone for its cloud in Europe. This is scheduled to be available in Ireland in early 2026. More precise figures are not yet known. However, Huawei reveals that computing capacity in Europe is growing by a factor of five. Huawei already has two availability zones in Dublin.

This brings Ireland up to par with the Turkey region, which already has three availability zones. In the Ireland region, this will increase the availability of the cloud. According to Huawei, it is said to be ten times larger in the area of data storage and databases. Furthermore, its in-house platform for AI agents called Versatile is said to run there. Huawei launched this in September 2025 at the global home trade fair in Shanghai.

Huawei steps up its storage game

Further innovations are available in the area of data storage. With OceanStor Pacific 9926, there is now a highly scalable product designed entirely for SSD (NVMe) with extremely high density. The chassis is two so-called height units and can accommodate up to 36 drives. Based on approximately 60 TByte per drive, this results in 2 PByte.

This is approximately eight times what is possible with conventional hard drives. Software functions include elastic erasure coding (Elastic EC), Smart-Tiering, SmartCache, SmartCompression, WORM (Write Once, Read Many), Geo-Replication, and Multi-Tenant Support, as well as the S3 object storage protocol.

Restoration three times faster

Huawei has optimized Elastic EC for high-capacity SSDs. In lab tests, 1 TByte of data could be restored within 10 minutes. With conventional systems, this normally takes about half an hour – three times as long. OceanStor Pacific 9926 features the following interfaces and protocols: 25GE/100GE/200GE TCP/IP, 25GE/100GE/200GE TCP/RoCE, and 100/200/400 Gb/s InfiniBand. These are available for connecting computers as well as other data storage devices. The latter is also known as storage interconnect.

Huawei has also enhanced the Oceandisk 1800 and 1610 products. The former comes with special processors, the DPUs (Data Processing Units). Analogous to GPUs in graphics, these are optimized for the data management use case. The use case is data centers where computers do not have built-in hard drives. Instead, they store data on products from the Oceandisk family. For the 1800 version, Huawei has tripled the bandwidth. It is now 160 GByte/s. The built-in monitoring system is said to be able to "predict" potential hard drive failures up to 14 days before the actual event.

Oceandisk 1610 is more intended for HPC (High Performance Computing) and calculations in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It delivers up to 5.2 million IOPS and is compatible with file systems such as Lustre, GPFS, and BeeGFS. Oceandisk 1610, like OceanStor Pacific 9926, is two height units in size and can accommodate up to 36 drives. The maximum bandwidth of 175 Gbyte/s is even higher than that of Oceandisk 1800.

(jkj)