Huawei Technologies (Nigeria) Limited says its OceanProtect Data Protection provides a
series of comprehensive data protection solutions that cover disaster recovery (DR), data
backups, and data archiving for the rapid growth of diversified service data and the entire
data lifecycle.
“Based on the concept of ‘full DR of hot data (data that needs to be accessed frequently),
quick backup and restore of warm data, and warm archiving of cold data’, OceanProtect
Data Protection can provide zero service interruption, data integrity, and long-term data
retention,” Mr. Ding, Director of IT Solution, Huawei Nigeria had said during the launch of
the solution for the Nigerian market earlier in the year.
The growing rate of malicious attacks targeted at organisations and users’ data as well
as the growing reliance of most sectors of the economy on data as more digital
transformation initiatives are implemented means more emphasis needs to be placed on
solutions that ai users in recovering data in the event of unplanned loss.
“As our businesses and lives become digitalized, our expectations for uninterrupted
productivity are absolute, making the continuity of data services and networks
increasingly important. Today, if a data center breaks down, it can have a significant
impact on people’s lives, more so for the vast majority of businesses that don’t have effective data recovery (DR) systems.
“Many critical financial and telecom enterprises on whose services national economies
and citizen’s livelihoods depend on, have not yet built intra-city or remote DR facilities.
Furthermore, in healthcare and manufacturing, where service continuity is key to saving
lives, many enterprises lack sufficient DR facilities. Even those that are constructing DR
facilities frequently encounter service interruptions as they evolve. Clearly, it’s time for enterprises to increase investment in DR solutions that enable disruption-free upgrades
to their productivity and service offering”.
In 2021, it was estimated that Nigeria and two other countries were victims of over 85
million cyber attacks. Poor supporting infrastructure such as electricity and internet
access, manpower and low IT skill challenges are also factors that increase the risks of
data loss, corruption or destruction.
“In recent years, cyber-attacks and misoperations have caused data corruption and loss
on a huge scale, whilst disaster recovery was imperative in these situations, it alone is
not sufficient to effectively protect against these threats. Therefore, it’s essential to
construct backup facilities. Explosive data growth means that more and more data needs
to be backed up in a fixed backup window. As a result, enterprises demand faster backup
speeds. The dependence of enterprise services on data makes data loss or long-term
inaccessibility unacceptable and rapid recovery in the event of a crisis crucial. To enable
quick backups and restoration of warm data, Huawei has launched two new industry-
leading backup and recovery bandwidths under the OceanProtect series, OceanProtect
X8000/X9000 Backup Storage.
“This is why Huawei promotes the full DR of hot data and the construction of DR facilities
for all production systems. Only this way can we ensure reliable business continuity.
Based on this idea, Huawei provides an integrated ‘active-active’ solution for SAN and
NAS, which allows one system to be used for both block and file storage services
commonly used in the financial, telecom, healthcare, and manufacturing industries. Both
types of services can be balanced through dual data centers, improving overall
performance and helping customers achieve maximum return on investment (ROI).
But some of these solutions are not “plug and play” he explained.
“High-level DR facilities are not built overnight. Long construction periods and high costs
hinder DR construction and the protection of production systems. To reduce an
enterprise’s initial investment and meet their evolving DR requirements, the Huawei
active-active DR solution also guarantees the non-disruptive upgrade from one system to
an active-active or active-passive dual-system deployment, and then to three-data-center
(3DC) or even multi-DC four-copy DR solution. Facilities can be upgraded online, and the
DR level increases as and when required. Customers can smoothly upgrade the DR
construction level based on their budgets and requirements to achieve better protection
for their production data,” Ding said.
