The City of Ekurhuleni Builds Bridges to a Smart Future with Huawei Storage

Ekurhuleni: A Tapestry of Diversity and Opportunity

Ekurhuleni, the third-largest metropolitan area in South Africa, is a living monument to urban vitality and ambition. Covering an area of about 2,000 km2 and home to approximately four million residents, this dynamic city pulses with life and progress. Motivated by a commitment to growth, sustainability, and technological advancement, the City of Ekurhuleni (CoE) is working to transform this place into a smart city, enhancing the quality of life for all residents. With a vision to integrate modern technology into everyday governance, the CoE stands at the forefront of a digital revolution, ready to bridge the gap between traditional services and the demands of a rapidly evolving world.

Navigating Challenges

Upon taking on the mission of smart city construction, the CoE faced the challenge of creating seamless connections across its various municipal services. The municipality recognized that to truly serve its citizens, it would have to reckon with the ways in which the current patchwork of disparate systems and data silos were hindering its operations. Aiming to enhance the efficiency and reliability of its services, the CoE committed to developing a unified platform to better manage various departments and applications.

The CoE's immediate aims were to:

• Accelerate service rollout: By eliminating data silos to streamline services, the CoE hoped to enable faster and more efficient deployment of new municipal offerings to meet the needs of residents.

• Enhance reliability: By unifying mission-critical application service systems that were previously deployed separately, the CoE hoped to ensure consistent and reliable access to essential services.

• Streamline O&M: The CoE also sought to address the fragmentation of services and improve operations and maintenance (O&M) efficiency, ensuring that municipal departments can collaborate effortlessly and provide timely responses to the needs of their communities.

With the goal of doubling its O&M efficiency, the CoE was seeking a way to build bridges that would not only connect its diverse departments but also pave the way for smarter, more responsive municipal governance.

The Bridge to Connectivity

Both the CoE and Huawei recognized the municipality's siloed data centers as a major factor behind the challenges impacting citizens and local enterprises, and so set their sights on data infrastructure that would allow seamless coordination between systems and across departments. Achieving this required a comprehensive, unified solution encompassing ICT hardware, virtualization platforms, and disaster recovery (DR) and backup capabilities. Their search soon led them to the Huawei DCS full-stack data center solution.

Huawei's DCS eSphere, an integral component of Huawei's DCS portfolio, provides unparalleled flexibility for modern data centers. It delivers a unified virtual resource platform with high reliability and scalability, enabling the CoE to flexibly expand service resources as demands evolve. With simplified virtual machine provisioning through a single UI, new municipal services can now be rolled out in hours, not days. The results were immediate and impactful: tasks that once demanded extensive time and effort can now be completed at almost half the cost.

This flexible approach, built on the Huawei ICT foundation comprising OceanStor Dorado, OceanStor Pacific, Data Protection Appliance (DPA), and FusionCube, not only ensures that IT resources are utilized efficiently, but also brings powerful DR capabilities that ensure service continuity even in the most extreme situations.

Specifically, OceanStor Pacific Scale-Out Storage empowers CoE with a highly reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient storage solution:

• High-density hardware design: OceanStor Pacific maximizes storage capacity within a smaller footprint, reducing CoE’s operational costs.

• High scalability: The storage system adopts fully symmetric distributed architecture that can expand nodes as demands, fitting the increasing data needs of CoE.

• 22+2 elastic Erasure Coding (EC): The data redundancy algorithm greatly improves the disk space utilization, saving CoE’s hardware investment.

• Intelligent data tiering: The storage automatically categorizes data into hot, warm and cold tiers based on customized policies, optimizing storage resource utilization and data lifecycle management.

Furthermore, leveraging remote replication and an active-active architecture, the CoE is now able to recover critical services almost instantaneously and safeguard against unexpected outages, minimize downtime, and protect valuable data.

Impressed by the Huawei solution, a telecommunications and network specialist at the City of Ekurhuleni shared, "At the City of Ekurhuleni, we are committed to improving public services and streamlining operations. With the Huawei DCS solution, we can manage everything in one place, with secure and stable integration between departments. It's a game-changer for how we serve our citizens."

Crossing into the Future

Ekurhuleni is a key hub for air transportation, rail, and data in South Africa. With a clear and hopeful vision for the future, the CoE is focused on improving public services, increasing citizen satisfaction, and fostering business growth.

The city's leadership is keenly aware of the importance of digital and intelligent transformation to this undertaking. They aim to integrate various departments, improve operational efficiency, and provide better, faster services, all while ensuring sustainability and resilience in the face of the challenges facing Ekurhuleni.

Huawei's comprehensive digital platform has proven to be an ideal partner in this transformation. With Huawei's support, the City of Ekurhuleni is well on its way to realizing its vision of a digitally empowered, connected city.