Amid global scrutiny, Chinese firm Huawei forays into automated database management

Amid growing international scrutiny over its main telecom equipment business, Chinese firm Huawei has launched an artificial intelligence-backed database management product for large enterprises. Called GaussDB, the product works on premises and cloud both, and marks the entry of the firm in the database field, pitting Shenzhen-based Huawei against Oracle, Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM and Microsoft. A database is an organised collection of electronically stored data.

Washington believes equipment made by Huawei, the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, could be used by the Chinese state to spy. It is trying to persuade its allies that Huawei poses national security risks. Huawei has repeatedly denied the allegations. David Wang, Huawei executive director of board and president of ICT (information and communication technology) strategy and marketing, highlighted the firm’s principles of openness, collaboration and shared success.

According to Huawei, GaussDB has enabled the embedding of artificial intelligence capabilities into the full lifecycle of distributed databases, making them self-tuning and self-healing, similar to the claims made by Oracle for its autonomous database.

Huawei has also claimed that its platform's performance was 50-60% better than its competitors and could redefine the data infrastructure, apart from being able to work on heterogeneous computing architecture.

The company also launched distributed storage platform FusionStorage 8.0, which will support critical enterprise applications. It added that the platform will raise the standards for performance, scale, and manageability of storage systems.

FusionStorage 8.0 has integrated artificial intelligence into full-lifecycle storage management, from resource planning and service provisioning to system optimisation, risk prediction, and fault location.

According to Huawei, enterprise demand for artificial intelligence computing power doubles every three months.