Huawei Empowers the University of Lille’s Digital Transformation Journey
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In 2020, the University of Lille launched an ambitious initiative to completely redesign its production infrastructure. This effort culminated in 2022 with the opening of a state-of-the-art data center, complemented by a disaster recovery site operated by a trusted housing provider. The project aimed to deliver the highest level of resilience, guaranteeing service continuity even in the event of a data center failure, while providing top-tier network, compute, and storage performance to support the university’s major digital transformation initiatives.
Aligned with its strategic vision, the University of Lille has opted for an on-premises infrastructure model, ensuring full control over performance, security, and data governance. Building on this robust foundation, the university now acts as a regional digital service provider, offering high-performance computing (HPC), cloud, and housing services to other universities across the Hauts-de-France region—affirming its role as a key player in technological sovereignty and shared innovation within French higher education.
Behind this transformation lay major IT and network challenges. The University of Lille experienced rapid growth following the 2018 merger of the three former Lille universities, the integration of the INSPE (the Higher National Institute for Teaching and Education, dedicated to teacher training) in 2020, and the affiliation of four major institutions in 2022: Sciences Po Lille, the École Supérieure de Journalisme (ESJ Lille), the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et de Paysage (ENSAP), and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Industries Textiles (ENSAIT). This expansion led to a sharp increase in both staff and student populations, making the University of Lille the largest university in France within just four years.
This rapid growth placed considerable pressure on the institution’s IT and network infrastructure. The existing storage systems had reached end-of-life, resulting in high maintenance costs, limited performance, and scalability issues. In parallel, the university established a metropolitan network interconnecting its 16 campuses and numerous partner institutions involved in higher education and research across the Lille metropolitan area. The backbone network, built on enterprise-grade network equipment and operating in a 40G ring, faced mounting demands from data-intensive applications and the expanding digital ecosystem.
To address these challenges, the University of Lille partnered with Huawei to design and deploy a next-generation IT and network infrastructure, ensuring scalability, resilience, and long-term performance to support the university’s ambitious digital transformation strategy.
Huawei replaced the university’s legacy storage with its high-performance, energy-efficient OceanStor series. This solution delivers scalable capacity, AI-driven data management, and enhanced reliability — ensuring continuous access to the university’s core IT production systems that support teaching, administration, and digital services across all campuses.
With its all-flash and NoF+ storage network architecture, Huawei’s solution delivers 20–30% higher performance than competing systems. Operating at a stable latency of just 0.1 ms, it guarantees smooth performance even during peak activity. Since deployment, the university has reported zero service interruptions and no complaints from students or faculty regarding system responsiveness.
Huawei also introduced a next-generation data center switch architecture that offers a cost-effective and future-ready alternative to traditional setups. Featuring intelligent management and high throughput, it provides a solid foundation for digital learning platforms, research applications, and administrative operations.
Huawei’s proven expertise in education digitization, demonstrated through successful deployments in numerous universities across Europe and beyond, played a decisive role in the project’s success.
Through Huawei’s advanced network and IT solutions, the University of Lille is building a smart, secure, and sustainable campus ecosystem that empowers teachers, students, and researchers to innovate without boundaries. With flexible architecture and competitive pricing, Huawei’s solutions have also enabled the university to reduce its total cost of ownership while ensuring room for future expansion.
This success story demonstrates how visionary leadership and cutting-edge technology can work hand in hand to reshape the future of education, not only for the University of Lille but for institutions around the world.
