Huawei-Symantec avoids diluted focus on partners to ensure brand effectiveness

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For better mileage of their NAS, SSD, cloud storage solution, Huawei Symantec is aggressive in gaining partners but they are highly cautious to not dilute their focus on too many partners.

Rather they are scouting for some selective but effective partners. While talking to ITPV, Chenlei, Country Manager, Huawei Symantec India elaborates on how the company is opening up all avenues for the selective partners to fulfill their mid-range and high-end enterprise SAN storage requirements effectively. In the age of cyber war, the hardware and security synergy has helped Huawei Symantec build up a new storage frontier through its Network Attached Storage, pure storage, SSD and cloud storage solutions.

1) Considering Huawei with a hardware expertise and Symantec with a strong hand on security, what is the USP, according to you, of the products that the joint venture comes up with? What is the current focus for the firm?

Our products combine the two companies’ synergic advantages to offer unified security appliances to our customers. The biggest advantage we have is our firewall performance and our content security protection, all in one box. We are focused on network security, and this includes FW, UTM, VPN, IPS, and Anti-DDoS.  Currently, we are designing appliances for enterprise customers, and to fulfill their future requirements.


2) Recently, we have seen the Oceanspace T-series release. Could you elaborate on the product's capability for storage consolidation?

The Oceanspace T-Series storage system is a middle-to-high-end storage system that was designed to meet the needs of middle and large scale enterprises. It meets the requirements of large scale database applications, including online transaction processing, online analysis processing, high performance computing, digital media, internet service providers, backup, disaster recovery, data migration and other scenarios. The main advantages of the T-Series include:

1.     High performance: It is powered by high performance hardware components, including 8Gb FC, 6Gb SAS2.0, PCIe 2.0, 10Gb/s Ethernet I/O channels, new generation 64bit multi-core CPU, and a cache of up to 192 gigabytes. SmartCache Technology provides highly intelligent data management for performance and data efficiency. And finally, all SSD RAID group options can be configured to achieve the highest performance of the storage system.

2.    Easy managed: The T-Series storage system can be easily managed and configured by the Integrated Storage Manager, and only 5 steps are needed to accomplish storage provisioning.  It supports a Graphical User Interface and command-line interface, an alarm through sound, light, short message or mail, and online firmware upgrading.


3.    Flexible:  TurboModule Technology enables multi-protocol support with FC, iSCSI, and SAS as the standard configuration on all models. It can significantly increase the density of I/O modules and ports in a single enclosure, and provide maximum flexibility for all I/O modules. Finally, it enables upgrade capabilities with hot-pluggable I/O modules to provide the highest system availability.

3) The N8500 also have set a storage benchmark. As I have read, the product has avoided stacks of Flash and achieved the operating speed only with the use of Hard Disk Drives. What was the strategy behind using a complete HDD system?

The Huawei Symantec N8500 clustered NAS storage system achieved performance peaks in the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation’s (SPEC) test, achieving the industry’s highest results with regard to NFS and CIFS benchmarks. We used HDD disks in the test instead of the SDDs as our competitors do for three reasons:

1.    Closer to the real application environment: Most NAS users rely on traditional HDD disks to establish their systems while very few choose SDD disks only. The N8500 series was developed to meet customers’ demands for higher system performance, so the HDD configuration produces the most realistic results that customers can get.

2.    Cost-effective: When purchasing equipment, customers are not only concerned about the performance of the system, but also its cost. Using configurations that are too costly is a poor strategy that customers will not accept.

3.    System scalability: Huawei Symantec’s N8000 system can be expanded to 16 nodes maximally. Using only 8 nodes, it has already achieved the industry’s highest results with regard to NFS and CIFS benchmarks in the SPEC test. This means that the N8000 system has potential to bring even higher performance to customers.

4) How does Symantec's security plays its role in all the OceanSpace products?

Huawei Symantec integrates the advantages of Symantec’s security software and Huawei’s hardware design. Leveraging Symantec’s software, Huawei Symantec has launched a series of unified software and hardware solutions.

5)  Oceanspace is also expected to come to the relief of channel partners facing a dent on the sudden rise of M&A within the storage industry. What is your approach to ensure more channel partners make the T-Series a part of their business strategy? How many partners have you all tied-up with?

T-Series helps our partners address their mid-range and high-end enterprise SAN storage requirements in the realm of large scale database including OLTP/OLAP, HPC, digital media, Internet Service Providers, backup, disaster recovery, data migration and other scenarios. These advantages allow our Channel Partners to thoroughly address their customers’ needs. We will ensure that the value proposition of our T-Series will be briefed to our partners in order to make this a part of their business strategy.

Currently, we are engaged with close to 50 partners in India including with national system integrators, solution focused partners and vertical focused specialists. We address our partner requirements with our local sales, pre-sales, and support presence in all key locations in India.


6) What are the most common problem that the channel partners face? How, does Huawei Symantec tries to address them?

We are 100 percent channel focused and our India headquarters is based in Bangalore. Big storage vendors already have channels but their focus is diluted. Therefore, partners have a lack of mindshare for many vendors today in India. This is where we concentrate on by providing focus, enablement, joint customer activities, and, of course, healthy margins to support our partners’ efforts.

If a partner is looking for a technologically advanced solution that offers significant margins and the flexibility of a mid-sized company, then we offer more value to the product. We have limited our scope to just a few motivated channel partners. The timing is right because with the recent consolidation of the industry, there are many channel partners out there looking for new alliances. Through a well-equipped demo center in Bangalore that will soon open, our partners can either allow their customers to visit there or they can conduct testing in customer environments across India. We view the demo center as a big leverage for partners.

7) Where does the future of Huawei-Symantec lies? Is it in pure storage solutions or the storage-attached network solution?

The future of Huawei Symantec lies in both pure storage solutions and in storage attached network solutions. The company works with enterprises of varying size and scope, and in an effort to customize solutions for each customer as much as possible, it is imperative that we tailor our solutions accordingly. In addition to NAS and pure storage solutions, Huawei Symantec also provides other types of storage solutions including SSD and cloud storage, which would too inspire our future steps.