Brazil and Huawei Upgrade eGov Network

Background

Planalto Palace in Brazil’s capital of Brasilia is one major example of how Huawei can upgrade and aggregate government networks while simplifying management. The Planalto Palace is the main office site for heads of state and core administrative departments of the Brazilian government, and its network is one of the most important in the country. Originally, it consisted of separate government office networks and government IT data center networks. However, as demand for services grew, the network architecture failed to keep up. The legacy network’s per capita bandwidth was less than 0.5 Mbit/s, yet service volume increased more than five-fold.

Challenges

The palace’s network supports large-scale voice, video, and instant messaging in addition to routine services for more than 5,000 workers, 7,000 PCs, and 3,000 IP phones. However, its original network was not built to support the co-existence of these services, and the space reserved for bandwidth upgrades was insufficient. What’s more, the original network was made up of devices from multiple vendors, and the non-intelligent network management system made network maintenance cumbersome. Fault location was difficult and network recovery time-consuming.

Frequent critical issues included:

• Bandwidth bottlenecks
• High service latency
• Frequent broadcast storms, packet loss, and IT system interruptions
• Video freezing
• Intermittent voice transmission

Solution

The Brazilian government selected the Huawei Agile Campus Network Solution to solve its many network problems. Huawei impressed the customer by re-constructing this large network in only three months. The Huawei solution included:

• New, simpler architecture that increases network speed and simplifies network O&M
• Huawei S9706 Terabit Series switches at the core, and S6700 10 GE and S5700 fixed-configuration gigabit Ethernet switches at aggregation and access layers
• Huawei Super Virtual Fabric (SVF) technology that implements the industry’s simplest converged networking
• Combined stacking and link aggregation that ensure 100 percent network resource usage

Benefits

Huawei’s solution not only improved Brazil’s Planalto Palace office network, but also set the stage for future transformation to a software-defined network. For example:

• Desktop access bandwidth increased from 100 Mbit/s to 1,000 Mbit/s
• Full 10 GE interconnections at the access layer ensured consistently clear transmission of audio and video services
• Network disconnections were eliminated, improving work efficiency
• Increased efficiency, lower cost of network O&M
• Improved fault location maximized ROI

Huawei also helped the Brazilian government reach its goal of reducing annual administrative spending by 20 percent — a win-win partnership that may be extended to Brazilian state government departments.