InfraX Plays a Key Role Accelerating Dubai’s Digital Development

The Customer

The most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Dubai also delivers one of the best qualities of life across the entire Middle East region, providing superior urban management for residents, covering everything from the energy supply to public services. And the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) — the exclusive provider of electricity and water services to residents — plays an important role in making that possible.

DEWA launched Digital DEWA as its digital arm in 2017, with the ambition of forging a new digital future for the city. Indeed, DEWA is the world’s first digital utility, using autonomous systems for renewable energy and storage, actively expanding the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide comprehensive digital services.

As such, InfraX, the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) arm of Digital DEWA, focuses on connecting customers with value-added services from its data centers and the cloud.

The Challenge

DEWA's optical cable resources are laid along transmission and distribution lines throughout Dubai, with substations covering all residential communities. It wanted to use these resources to help achieve Digital DEWA's aims. And research has already highlighted that government ministries, enterprises, and data centers all urgently need to be connected using enterprise-class, high quality broadband services.

However, most substations don't have sufficient space to accommodate new ICT devices. Furthermore, to ensure the security of existing services and personnel in substations, co-deploying ICT devices alongside electric power devices inevitably makes Operations and Maintenance (O&M) hard. Therefore, within substations, it's preferable to find a new site to build a dedicated communication equipment room. Traditionally, construction takes a long time, involving a land survey and an approval process before building work can even begin. Yet, if a ready to build, flat-pack or common container solution is used instead, protection, fireproof, and shockproof specifications can't be guaranteed. There is, however, another way.

The Solution

Huawei’s solution to address equipment room construction problems just like this includes the one-stop FusionDC1000A solution, which offers fast deployment, high reliability, fully digital O&M, and a high level of convergence for ICT devices.

• Fast deployment: A highly integrated modular design is used, with power distribution, cooling, fire extinguishing, security protection, and monitoring subsystems prefabricated in the factory and delivered as an end product. FusionDC1000A can be brought online in just one day after simple hoisting and commissioning work, saving over 85% of time and rapidly accelerating Time To Market (TTM).

• High reliability: FusionDC1000A uses highly reliable, robust containers with a service life of 25 years. While an IP65-rated protection level indicates that they are both dust and moisture resistant, shockproof capability is equivalent to McNair's 9 intensity and comparable to that of traditional buildings. A high strength mechanical lock protects core assets, while high temperature resistant applications are perfectly suited to the challenging climate of Dubai. In addition, the container is naturally isolated from the main business of DEWA, assuring reliability and security across the board.

• Digital O&M: An intelligent management platform implements unified management of power supply, cooling, access control, and Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) on the entire network, with visualized and remote O&M, making unattended sites possible and greatly simplifying the O&M experience.

The Success

The value that Huawei FusionDC1000A brings has been recognized by InfraX, from deployment to O&M. Indeed, FusionDC1000A has allowed InfraX to deploy reliable and scalable services. The digitalization of DEWA is happening as part of the Dubai 10X initiative — launched by HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of UAE and the Ruler of Dubai — that aims to propel Dubai into the future, positioning the city 10 years ahead of other global cities through government innovation and the reformation of traditional working practices.