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

Ekurhuleni: A City with a Vision

Covering an area of some 2000 km2 and home to approximately four million residents, the third-largest metropolitan area in South Africa — and a key hub for air transportation, rail, and data — is actively working to transform itself into a smart city. This is the City of Ekurhuleni (CoE).

The vision is a simple one. Integrate modern technology into everyday governance in order to enhance the quality of life for every resident. It may be a simple vision, but it places Ekurhuleni firmly at the forefront of a smart city revolution as it works to bridge the gap between traditional services and the rapidly evolving demands of everyday life in an increasingly digital world.

Navigating Challenges

Taking up this mission of smart city construction, the city faced challenges of course, not least creating seamless connections across its various municipal services. Indeed, the city recognized that, to truly serve its citizens, it would have to reckon with its existing patchwork of disparate systems and data silos, which were hindering operations and, in turn, impacting citizens and local enterprises alike.

So, with efficiency and reliability as its end goal, the CoE committed to developing a unified platform to better manage various departments and applications, with three immediate aims.

• Accelerate service rollout: Eliminating data silos to streamline services, the city hoped to enable faster and more efficient deployment for new municipal offerings that better meet the needs of residents.

• Enhance reliability: Unifying mission-critical application service systems, Ekurhuleni looked to ensure consistent and reliable access to essential services.

• Streamline O&M: Addressing the fragmentation of services, the city also sought to double Operations and Maintenance (O&M) efficiency, to ensure effortless collaboration between municipal departments and rapidly respond to the needs of the community in a much smarter way.

The Bridge to Connectivity

Identifying these issues, the CoE set its sights on data infrastructure that would foster seamless coordination between systems and across departments. This required a comprehensive, unified solution encompassing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) hardware, virtualization platforms, and Disaster Recovery (DR) and backup capabilities. The city's search ended with the full-stack Huawei Data Center Virtualization Solution (DCS).

Unparalleled Flexibility

Huawei's DCS eSphere, an integral component of Huawei's DCS portfolio, provides unparalleled flexibility for 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 (VM) provisioning through a single User Interface (UI), new municipal services can now be rolled out in hours, not days. The results have been immediate — and effective. Tasks that once demanded extensive time and effort can now be completed at almost half the cost.

This flexible approach, built on a Huawei ICT foundation — comprising OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage, OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage, Data Protection Appliance (DPA), and FusionCube converged data storage infrastructure — not only ensures that Information Technology (IT) resources are utilized efficiently, but also brings powerful DR capabilities, ensuring service continuity even in the most extreme situations.

Specifically, OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage empowers the CoE with a highly reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient storage solution.

• A high-density hardware design: OceanStor Pacific maximizes storage capacity with a smaller physical footprint than alternatives, reducing the CoE's operating costs.

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

• 22 + 2 elastic Erasure Coding (EC): A data redundancy algorithm significantly improves disk space utilization, saving on hardware investment.

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

In addition, using remote replication and an active-active architecture, the CoE is now able to recover critical services almost instantaneously as well as safeguard against unexpected outages, minimize downtime, and protect valuable data assets.

A Game-Changer

A telecommunications and network specialist at the CoE explained: "At the CoE, 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 a Smarter Future

With a clear and optimistic vision for the future, Ekurhuleni 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. And Huawei's comprehensive digital platform has proven to be an ideal partner, with the CoE now on its way to realizing its vision of a digitally empowered, connected smart city.