Huawei will be engaged in the localized production of servers in Russia together with Sitronics. The partnership, under certain conditions, will allow the Chinese company to enter the register of domestic equipment. In addition, Huawei hopes to become an exclusive supplier of server products for MTS.
Already in May 2021, the first batch of 2.5 thousand localized Huawei Enterprise servers will be released at the enterprises of the Russian telecom equipment manufacturer Sitronics. The agreement of the Chinese company with a domestic manufacturer for the joint development and production of servers was first reported by Kommersant, representatives of Sitronics and Huawei confirmed this data.
As part of the partnership, Huawei agreed to the conditions for localization of server assembly with Sitronics, proposed by Sistema, due to which it can now count on the status of an exclusive supplier of equipment for MTS (Sistema controls both Sitronics and MTS – ed.), a source familiar with the details of the project told Kommersant. Sistema and MTS declined to comment.
At first, Huawei's participation in the joint project will consist of the supply of server components, expertise and training of specialists. Localized servers will be made on Intel processors, and in the future it is planned to deploy production of data storage systems (storage systems) with software adapted for them of Russian origin, said Denis Dubinin, business development manager of IT solutions for Huawei Enterprise.
In the future, Huawei expects to receive the status of domestic equipment for localized equipment, a source close to the company told Kommersant. According to him, currently the share of localized Huawei servers in the Russian market does not exceed 1%.
For the first time, Sitronics announced plans to release servers under its own brand in January 2021. It was then that the structure of Sistema announced its intention to invest about 200 million rubles in the development and production of server products, and it was also about Intel processors. The production of servers, as reported, will be established at the production facilities of Element Group of Companies, Rostec and Sistema.
According to the Executive Director of the Association of Russian Electronics Developers and Manufacturers (ARPE) According to Ivan Pokrovsky, the tight start-up time of production indicates the large-node nature of the assembly of localized Huawei products. This fact and the use of foreign processors exclude the possibility of including such products in the register of domestic equipment of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the expert believes.
At the end of 2020 The Russian government has approved a requirement for various categories of computer equipment to have a domestic processor for inclusion in the register of Russian products of the Ministry of Industry and Trade. This register is a reference point for purchases of state bodies and a number of state-owned companies. In particular, on January 1, from 2022, only servers running on domestic processors will be included in the register.
According to Ivan Pokrovsky, the mutual investments of the parties in such production can amount to tens of millions of rubles, "Kommersant" notes.
Svetlana Legostaeva, General Director of the Computer Engineering Consortium, recalled that currently one of the main conditions for assigning the status of a localized product is that the manufacturer has the rights to design and technological documentation, as well as to a complete set of software.
According to Legostaeva, it is not yet clear whether the Huawei project will be able to meet these requirements, but according to a source of Kommersant close to Huawei, the company is considering the possibility of transferring the rights to the development to a Russian partner as part of the localization project.
This is not the first attempt by Huawei Enterprise to localize the production of its servers in Russia. Back in late 2019, Huawei and Norsi-Trans signed an agreement to establish a joint production facility in Russia. Then the parties agreed on the release of various solutions for the implementation of the national project "Digital Economy", as well as plans to launch the production of equipment for the implementation of the"law of Spring".
At that time, the parties also expected that MTS and its subsidiary MGTS would become one of the potential customers of Norsi-trans and Huawei equipment. According to the CEO of Norsi-trans» Sergey Ovchinnikov, the experiment was unsuccessful due to the high price: the project was discontinued after the production of a small batch of servers in 2019.
In May 2019, Huawei found itself at the epicenter of a trade war between the United States and China, and as a result, the US administration forced a number of major American IT companies-such as Google, Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom and others – to curtail cooperation with a Chinese partner.
Pressure from the United States and the risk of potential sanctions for partners forced Huawei Enterprise to reconsider its development strategy in most countries. In particular, the company had to curtail the promotion of its own cloud brand Huawei Cloud in Russia less than a year after its launch and investment of tens of millions of dollars.
Instead, Huawei announced a partnership with SberCloud (Sberbank) to develop the SberCloud cloud platform.Advanced. After becoming a partner of Huawei, SberCloud purchased server hardware and software from it.
Back in early 2020, Huawei announced the possibility of installing the Russian "Red OS" on its latest Huawei Taishan 200 servers with Kunpeng 920 ARM processors. Earlier, the company also achieved compatibility of its servers with the Russian one OS Astra Linux Special Edition and OS of the "Alt" family of the company "Basalt SPO".
According to IDC Russia, the Russian server hardware market showed significant positive dynamics in 2020, increasing by 18.2% year-on - year to $1.319 billion. In the final quarter of 2020, 48,237 servers of all types were delivered for $411.85 million. The share of deliveries of RISC systems in monetary terms was 11.2%, the share of servers of the traditional x86 architecture was 88.8%.
According to IDC analysts, the growth driver was traditionally a large corporate segment. Government spending and investment by large companies, especially in the financial and telecommunications sectors, have been the most active drivers of the growth of the x86 server system market.
