Dubai Municipality has selected Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) to modernize its data centre network.
Big Switch said Dubai Municipality is the first data centre in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region to be operational via software-defined networking (SDN) technology and integrated and orchestrated with VMware. The next phase of its project is to integrate BCF into the VMware Horizon VDI on VxRail deployment.
This project is part of the Smart Dubai initiative that began in 2014. With this initiative Dubai is creating a city where all its resources are optimised for maximum efficiency, where services are integrated seamlessly into daily life, where it protects both its people and information, which will result in a more enriched life and business experience for all.
Dubai Municipality gains from Big Switch
# Increased switching speed by 42x
# Increased backbone capacity by 16x
# Increased network performance, speed and bandwidth
# Reduced overall infrastructure size
# Reduced migration complexities and costs
# Network architectures fully supported via software-defined policies
# Increased visibility into critical network traffic via fabric-wide span
# Integration of Big Cloud Fabric to vCenter enabled onboarding of new applications without the need to manually provision the physical network
# Environment is scalable and future-proofed for integrations with cloud and open technologies
The company said Dubai Municipality’s deployment leverages a “core and pod” approach which provides enhanced visibility and automation for vSphere server virtualization deployments. The Big Cloud Fabric controller is a single pane of glass that integrates with VMware vSphere to automate the network application deployment on the physical SDN fabric.
With Big Cloud Fabric, Dubai Municipality was able to combine its three data centres to one logical network domain, which resulted in the reduction of physical and logical migrations costs by 90 percent.
“Dubai Municipality was able to deploy Big Cloud Fabric in only eight days, across three data centres, transforming the infrastructure from a traditional network topology to next-generation SDN,” said Ahmad Mohamed Darwish Ali Emadi, IT Infrastructure Project Manager.
Ahmed Mohammed Kajoor, head of IT Infrastructure, Dubai Municipality, said: “Big Cloud Fabric provides us significant and ongoing advantages that we did not previously experience and would not have experienced with other solutions we reviewed.”
Syed Ghayur, head of Worldwide System Engineering, Big Switch Networks, said Big Cloud Fabric has enabled Dubai Municipality to experience benefits which include increased network performance, speed and bandwidth, while reducing its Opex and Capex costs.
