Huawei rises in the storage ranks despite sanctions and tariffs

What are Huawei’s origins?

Huawei is based in Shenzhen and was founded in 1987. It started out building telecom switches (PBXs) and expanded into cellular network equipment. It has since expanded to servers, storage, PCs and laptops, and mobile devices.

In mobile devices, Huawei experienced a rapid rise in market share from 2011 onwards, but that declined after US sanctions late in the decade. It has, however, overtaken world smartphone market leader Apple in the China market.

The firm’s founder, Ren Zhengfei served in the People’s Liberation Army for more than a decade and was a member of the Communist Party. Early contracts with the Chinese military and public sector supported Huawei's growth. The firm has been accused of breaching intellectual property laws, being overly close to the Chinese government, and building backdoors into its equipment that allowed surveillance by Chinese authorities. Huawei has fought its corner vigorously against such accusations. 

Where does Huawei rank in storage market revenue and share?

Huawei is rapidly growing sales and market share and is second only to Dell in IDC’s Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker for external storage – i.e. arrays – which showed Huawei increased its market share by 5.9% in 2022-2023. That equated to a rise in revenue from $2.88bn in 2022 and market share of 9% to $3.05 in 2023 and share of 9.7%.

Huawei is therefore ahead of HPE, Lenovo, NetApp, Pure Storage, Hitachi Vantara and IBM in storage array market share.

In 2024, Huawei posted revenues of CNY862.1 billion, CNY62.6 billion in net profits, and spent 21% of its revenues on R&D, according to its annual report.

How have US tariffs affected Huawei?

In some senses, Huawei is relatively unaffected by the current flurry of Trump tariffs, which have hit 125% on Chinese imports, although a big chunk of that was rescinded for tech products at the time of writing.

Huawei was already subject to US sanctions that banned import of some of its equipment, particularly but not exclusively in telco hardware. The US also attempted to influence its allies to enforce similar moves but this manifested inconsistently, with only seven of 27 EU member states fully complying.

That all worked to limit Huawei’s global smartphone business and hit its telecoms hardware exports in some markets, but it has fared well outside US-aligned nations.

A big danger for Huawei is, however, that the Trump presidency will escalate sanctions on the company and pressure allies into isolating Chinese companies as the US shifts to a strategic anti-China stance.

But, as the world potentially remodels existing relationships, there is always a chance Huawei and other Chinese companies could plough new furrows, such as in in Europe, where the new administration’s strategic shifts have given it the cold shoulder.

What are Huawei’s key storage array products?

Huawei groups its hardware data storage under the OceanStor brand, with several key product lines.

OceanStor A – currently represented by the A800 – brings very high performance via distributed storage and is aimed at AI training and inference workloads.

OceanStor Dorado are all-flash systems aimed at mission-critical applications, core banking, databases, and applications that need very high performance and reliability. The flagship Dorado 8000 and 18000 scale to 32 controllers with block and file access with NVMe and other SSD form factors. Other Dorado series are the 5000/6000, also with up to 32 controllers, the 3000 that goes to 16, and the 2100 entry-level array with up to 8 controllers.

OceanStor Pacific is flash and HDD-equipped scale-out hardware – up to 4,096 nodes – and is aimed at massive unstructured dataset (via NFS/CIFS, HDFS, object), such as images, videos, big data and HPC workloads. It comes in products aimed at performance (flash), balanced (ie, performance and secondary storage but all HDD with some SSD cache), video (streaming and archiving, all-HDD again), and archiving with HDD. Variants are differentiated by numbers of drive slots and rack units.

OceanStor is Huawei’s hybrid flash (SSD and HDD) line. The OceanStor 18510 and 18810 scale to 32 controllers and allow file, block and object (S3) access with NVMe and SAS HDD capacity. OceanStor 6810, while the 5xxx series runs to 16 controllers, and the 2xxx series can have up to to eight controllers and is only SAS capacity (i.e. not NVMe).

OceanProtect is the supplier’s dedicated backup, DR and archiving line, which includes X series backup appliances from entry-level to high-end, plus OceanCyber 300 aimed at ransomware detection and attack analysis, and a planned OceanProtect E series aimed very high capacities and long-term data retention.

OceanDisk Smart Disk Enclosures connect to cloud storage for independent scaling of storage capacity in diskless datacentres. It is aimed at datacentre operators that have their own file-systems and only require high-performance and reliable block storage without advanced features.

FusionCube is Huawei’s converged infrastructure offer, and comes in a range of rackspace sizes (8U to 42U), plus FusionCube software hyper-converged infrastructure.

What does Huawei’s cloud storage offer comprise?

Huawei’s cloud offer seems to have developed since our previous profile of the supplier. It offers a wide range of server and storage options, including those aimed at specific use cases such as AI, databases and containers etc.

These include Cloud Flexus and Cloud Server aimed at a variety of use cases from AI, through containers, to general compute and specialised workloads such as video surveillance.

Cloud storage services include Huawei’s Object Storage Service, Scalable File Service (NAS), Scalable File Service Turbo (also NAS), Dedicated Distributed Storage Service (block access), Elastic Volume Service (also block).

There are also data protection and disaster recovery services that include Cloud Server Backup Service, Cloud Backup and Recovery (for cloud and on-premise), and Storage Disaster recovery Service.

What is Huawei’s storage as-a-service consumption model offer?

Since we last reported on the company, Huawei has added storage consumption models for on-premise hardware.

Huawei’s FlashEver offers a range of block, file and object storage via a cloud management interface on differing SLA variants across on-premise and cloud that cover extreme performance, premium, standard and capacity.

What workloads and market verticals does Huawei storage target?

Huawei’s background in telecoms means that this remains a key vertical for the company; its first storage products were designed for telco operators. The supplier also has a strong public sector customer base in China.

Today, Huawei’s enterprise division positions itself less by industry vertical than by capabilities such as mission critical, resilient systems, AI and machine learning, and use cases such as unstructured data storage and virtualisation. The supplier is, however, well-placed to provide technology where those verticals converge, such as China’s fast-growing automotive industry.

The company is pushing workloads that require consistent high performance – through its all-flash systems – as well as resilience and where data volumes are set to scale.

How does Huawei perform in different geographies?

In terms of geography, according to Huawei’s annual report, China remains its largest market. In 2024, its revenues were (in billions of Chinese Yuan) CNY615.2 in its domestic market (up from CNY471.3 in 2023), CNY148.3 in EMEA (CNY145.3) and CNY43.3 in Asia Pacific (CNY41.0).

Americas revenue came to CNY36.3 (CNY35.3). Domestic growth therefore makes up the bulk of Huawei’s revenue increases and may reflect, in part, the impact of sanctions and bans on Huawei in the United States, the UK, and other markets.