Huawei AI for Smart Cities and Telecommunications

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Huawei AI for Smart Cities and Telecommunications

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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 simple: Integrate modern technology into everyday governance in order to enhance the quality of life for every resident. The city faced challenges creating seamless connections across its various municipal services—its existing patchwork of disparate systems and data silos was hindering operations and impacting citizens and local enterprises alike. With efficiency and reliability as its end goal, the CoE committed to developing a unified platform with three aims: Accelerate service rollout by eliminating data silos; Enhance reliability by unifying mission-critical application service systems; Streamline O&M to double Operations and Maintenance efficiency. The CoE selected the full-stack Huawei Data Center Virtualization Solution (DCS). Huawei's DCS eSphere provides 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 provisioning through a single User Interface, new municipal services can now be rolled out in hours, not days. Tasks that once demanded extensive time and effort can now be completed at almost half the cost. 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—the solution ensures efficient IT resource utilization and powerful DR capabilities, ensuring service continuity even in extreme situations. OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage provides high-density hardware design, fully symmetric distributed architecture for on-demand node expansion, 22+2 elastic Erasure Coding for improved disk space utilization, and intelligent data tiering. Using remote replication and an active-active architecture, the CoE can recover critical services almost instantaneously and protect valuable data assets. A telecommunications and network specialist at the CoE stated: "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." Huawei's comprehensive digital platform has proven to be an ideal partner, with the CoE realizing its vision of a digitally empowered, connected smart city.