Dubai Municipality Selects Big Switch Networks for Middle East's First Production SDN Data Center Deployment

Dubai Municipality to join Big Switch webinar March 15th to Discuss its Data Center Modernization Journey


SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 14, 2017) - Big Switch Networks®, The Next-Generation Data Center Networking Company, today announced that Dubai Municipality chose Big Switch's Big Cloud Fabric™(BCF) to modernize its data center network. Dubai Municipality is the first data center in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region to be completely outfitted and operational via software-defined networking (SDN) technology and fully integrated and orchestrated with VMware. The next phase of its project is to integrate BCF into the VMware Horizon VDI on VxRail deployment.

Dubai Municipality will join Big Switch for a webinar to discuss its data center modernization project in more detail. Participating in this webinar are Ahmad Mohamed Darwish Ali Alemadi, Dubai Municipality's IT Infrastructure Projects & Data Center Manager and Syed Ghayur, Head of Worldwide System Engineering at Big Switch Networks. The webinar is Wednesday, March 15th at 9am PT. TO REGISTER: bit.ly/2mfNKvU  

This project is part of the Smart Dubai initiative, which began in 2014 and was established to empower, deliver and promote an efficient, seamless, safe and impactful city experience for residents and visitors. By leveraging the latest in technology innovation and customer experience design, together with a culturally-aligned, science-based approach, Smart Dubai is uniting two powerful forces for city transformation. 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.

With this deployment, Dubai Municipality experienced the following advantages:

  • 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

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 directly 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 centers to one logical network domain, which resulted in the reduction of physical and logical migrations costs by 90%.

The team from Dubai Municipality who were responsible for this project, from proof of concept through deployment include: His Excellency Eng. Hussain Lootah, Director General at Dubai Municipality, Mr. Mohammad Al Zaffin, IT Director at Dubai Municipality, Mr. Ahmed Kajoor, Head of IT infrastructure at Dubai Municipality and Mr. Ahmad Al Emadi, IT Infrastructure Project Manager at Dubai Municipality.

SUPPORTING MATERIALS
Case Study: Dubai Municipality Drives CapEx Savings and Operational Simplicity
Data Sheet: Big Cloud Fabric
Solutions Page: Next-gen Physical Networking for VMware SDDC
Website: Smart Dubai
Video: Big Cloud Fabric Explained

SUPPORTING QUOTES
"Dubai Municipality was able to deploy Big Cloud Fabric in only eight days, across three data centers, transforming the infrastructure from a traditional network topology to next-generation SDN," said Ahmad Mohamed Darwish Ali Emadi, IT Infrastructure Project Manager. "The success of this project was the result of the training provided to us from Big Switch at the company's U.S. headquarters and an intelligent, agile, and flexible solution. The complete configuration and deployment was done in-house, proving both our team's capabilities and Big Switch's technology."

"Dubai Municipality selected Big Switch Networks as part of Smart Dubai because the company offered the most innovative solution for our specific needs, it radically decreased our costs and offered network automation," said Ahmed Mohammed Kajoor, Head of IT Infrastructure, Dubai Municipality. "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."

"We are thrilled to have played such an integral role in Dubai Municipality's data center modernization," said Syed Ghayur, Head of Worldwide System Engineering, Big Switch Networks. "Big Cloud Fabric has enabled Dubai Municipality to experience benefits which include increased network performance, speed and bandwidth, while dramatically reducing its OPEX and CAPEX costs and accelerating the delivery of innovative services to its residents."

About Big Switch Networks
Big Switch Networks is the Next-Generation Data Center Networking Company. We disrupt the status quo of networking by designing intelligent, automated and flexible networks for our customers around the world. We do so by leveraging the principles of software-defined networking (SDN), coupled with a choice of industry-standard hardware. Big Switch Networks has two solutions: Big Monitoring Fabric, a Next-Generation Network Packet Broker, which enables pervasive security and monitoring of data center and cloud traffic for inline or out-of-band deployments and Big Cloud Fabric, the industry's first Next-Generation switching fabric that allows for choice of switching hardware for OpenStack, VMware, Container and Big Data use cases. Big Switch Networks is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, with offices located in Tokyo, Sydney, London and Istanbul. For additional information, email info@bigswitch.com, follow @bigswitch, or visit www.bigswitch.com.

Big Switch Networks, Big Cloud Fabric, Big Monitoring Fabric, BigSecure, Big Chain, Switch Light OS, and Switch Light VX are trademarks or registered trademarks of Big Switch Networks, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.

Contact Information:

Media & Analyst Contact
Kate Lehman
kate@bigswitch.com