Both China Mobile and China Unicom are using Huawei’s CloudFabric for their data center modernization programs.

China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile provider with 873 million subscribers, is building a private cloud at five of its data centers in the cities of Hohhot and Harbin in China. The private cloud will support the carrier in evolving its traditional IT systems to a centralized cloud computing platform. China Mobile says, once completed, this will be the world's largest OpenStack project.

China Mobile chose its affiliated company China Mobile Suzhou Software Technology to provide the OpenStack distribution and its BC-OP product to manage the data centers, according to an emailed response from China Mobile.

China Unicom is also using Huawei's CloudFabric for a private cloud. The company wanted to move away from its traditional data centers, which it said are no longer suitable for large numbers of servers and the requirements for quick provisioning of new services.

China Unicom’s private cloud, built exclusively by Huawei, uses virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) technology to increase the number of servers from 1,000 to over 5,000. In addition, it's using Huawei's SDN controller to facilitate automatic network configuration, significantly shortening the new service provisioning cycle.

Ian Foo, ‎director of network switching, gateway, and security products at Huawei USA, said the company’s CloudFabric for data centers includes everything from the switches to the company’s Agile software-defined networking (SDN) controller. Cloud Fabric competes with cloud data center systems from companies such as Juniper Networks, Arista Networks, and Cisco.

Huawei’s competitors often divide their business into two segments: service providers and enterprises.

“What’s interesting is CloudFabric is a single architecture that satisfies the needs of carriers and cloud providers as well as enterprises,” said Foo. “It’s the same solution for both markets. We have one development organization and add capabilities to tailor to service providers or enterprises instead of having parallel efforts. It maintains consistency in the software.”

Huawei says its CloudFabric has been deployed at more than 1,200 data centers in over 120 countries.

Huawei has been a bit of a political punching bag in the United States of late. First, it was disappointed at the CES 2018 show in Las Vegas. It had anticipated that AT&T would announce a smartphone collaboration with Huawei in the U.S. But that didn’t materialize.

Then, U.S. Congressman Mike Conaway (R-Texas) introduced the H.R. 4747 bill entitled “The Defending U.S. Government Communications Act” that would prohibit the government from purchasing or leasing telecommunications equipment and/or services from Huawei and ZTE.

In an email to SDxCentral, Huawei’s response to H.R. 4747 is: “Our products and solutions are used by major carriers, Fortune 500 companies, and hundreds of millions of consumers in more than 170 countries around the world. We have earned the trust of our partners across the global value chain. Huawei has no expectations of doing business with the U.S. government, so such provisions would have no effect on us.”