Diputación de Alicante’s Agile Network

Background

The Diputación de Alicante is a public institution that serves Alicante’s citizens and maintains responsibility for all government business in the province of Alicante. The institution manages the census application system, accounting management system, employee presence control system, asset control system, the “council in the cloud” project, as well as virtualization of servers, and maintenance of personal computers for the councils. Diputación de Alicante includes 101 councils that covers 20,000 citizens. It also has 45 branches, 500 Virtual Machines (VMs), 400 websites, and 100 domains. Diputación de Alicante provides a variety of services that includes applications that manage the council’s budget over websites or Citrix, plus other services such as email, Domain Name Service (DNS), and file servers. The institution must monitor all systems, check network connectivity, and avert IP system attacks.

Challenges

The Alicante e-Government network had been in use for 10 years. The aged network could not meet service development requirements and the warranty was about to expire.

With the use of IT becoming more common, the municipal government was dedicated to improving social administration and public services with new technologies. The live network could not meet service development requirements. For example, the demands for cloud applications and Voice over IP (VoIP) services continued to grow. Therefore, the network bandwidth needed an upgrade.

The wireless office had become part of daily work routines. Unified authentication and authentication for data security is difficult to ensure.

The mobile office increased in popularity among government office personnel for service management. An influx of smart devices slowed the existing mobile network’s performance. In addition, unified authentication and network automation could not be implemented on the live network, which caused data security risks. Therefore, performance upgrades and wireless network reconstruction were critical requirements.

IT and IP systems were managed and maintained separately, which complicated Operations and Maintenance (O&M) and hindered the implementation of network automation.

Solution

Huawei helped the Alicante government build efficient, unified campus office and data center networks. These new networks used the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture and leveraged an Agile Controller to implement end-to-end management and configuration automation. As a result, IT and IP systems could interconnect to ensure fast new service rollouts.

The new network architecture supports 10 GE, 25 GE, 40 GE, and 100 GE physical server access, to prepare for on-demand elastic scaling.

Super Virtual Fabric (SVF) technology for device virtualization helps establish a non-ring high-reliability network to simplify network device O&M.

Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) and Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) are supported, and enable smooth evolution to SDN to meet the needs both now and in the future.

Huawei technologies allow advancement from fiber channels to a hyper-converged scenario with 10 GE, 40 GE, and 100 GE ports.

Huawei’s innovative technologies use the Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) protocol to access storage. Huawei’s switches offer faster speeds than those from other vendors.

Benefits

The newly constructed e-Government network has shown considerable improvements in service convenience and O&M efficiency. Employees’ work has become more flexible and efficient, while citizens appreciate the improved services. Specific benefits include, but are not limited to, the following:

A new data center with higher performance, higher reliability, and more elastic scaling meets service needs for the next 5 to 10 years.

SDN-ready network evolution eliminates the need for network reconfiguration at a later stage and ensures fast new service rollouts.

Huawei’s fast response and expertise enable agility for customer programs and network fault management.