Huawei Supports the ICT and Business Requirements of Digital DEWA

The Customer

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

DEWA is the exclusive provider of electricity and water services to the residents of Dubai — the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — and Digital DEWA, the organization's digital arm, was set up in 2017 with the ambition of forging a new digital future for the city. As such, it has played a leading role in the adoption of digital technologies. Indeed, DEWA is the world’s first digital utility, using autonomous systems for renewable energy, storage, expansion into the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and digital services.

The Challenge

With a clear strategy for Information Technology (IT) cloudification for its electric power operations, Digital DEWA's infrastructure includes equipment sourced from multiple vendors at the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer, with an active-standby relationship between data centers. Such a setup increases bandwidth requirements between data centers and results in heavy traffic after enterprise services migrate to the cloud.

Quite simply, Infrax's smart grid services needed to be upgraded, to increase bandwidth, improve overall Operations and Maintenance (O&M) efficiency, and reduce costs, to boost cost-effectiveness and be able to meet future service plans.

Digital DEWA was therefore looking to upgrade its Data Center Interconnect (DCI) network, to provide access to multiple services, large bandwidth, high reliability, simplified deployment, and visualized O&M across three data centers. The proposed network required a dedicated DCI solution with a focus on lower costs, simplified O&M, fast response for after-sales services, and future-proof scalability.

The Solution

Huawei's OptiXtrans DC908features one-click automatic deployment — in just 8 minutes — and single-fiber bandwidth evolution to 88 Tbit/s, along with high reliability and high security. There were good reasons for Digital DEWA to opt for OptiXtrans DC908.

• Ultra-large bandwidth and flexible evolution: With 9.6T per sub-rack, 48 Tbit/s per fiber (120 wavelengths at the Super C band lambda), 88 Tbit/s per fiber (220 wavelengths at the Super C + L bands), 100–800G programmable for future requirements over 10 years, and a lower per bit cost.

• Simplified deployment and intelligent O&M: Technologies such as automatic fiber discovery and automatic commissioning are used to implement one-click deployment and agile service deployment. In addition, in the case of a broken fiber, the built-in Fiber Doctor (FD) function quickly locates the fault site within 3 minutes, greatly improving O&M efficiency. Gradient fiber faults can also be predicted using intelligent algorithms, quite unlike the rest of the industry where, in most cases, external third-party Optical Time Domain Reflectometers (OTDRs) are required, meaning extra investment and more complex management.

• Simplified hardware design: An integrated design reduces 90% of internal fiber connections at the optical layer.

• Unified access: Diverse services are supported, including Fibre Channel (FC) 32G and 100 GE, with unified O&M for storage and Ethernet services.

• High reliability: With more than 20 years of technical experience in the optical field, Huawei knows how to deliver reliable designs: all modules in the OptiXtrans DC908 solution feature 1 + 1 backup.

The Success

The dedicated DCI solution built by Huawei addresses the ICT and business requirements of Digital DEWA, delivering optimized Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and cutting-edge technology that represents extremely good value. The solution fully utilizes existing optical fiber resources and supports service expansion and smooth network evolution. Deploying Huawei’s OptiXtrans DC908, the cost of a self-built network can be recovered within a single year, with automatic commissioning and simplified architecture allowing Digital DEWA’s own IT engineers to deploy it with ease. High capacity per fiber and the high integration of OptiXtrans DC908 save fiber leasing- and space-related costs. And, after the deployment of the InfraX Network Operations Centre (NOC), Huawei continues to support Digital DEWA in providing rapid response and expert service support, as and when required.