Brocade helps the government agency build a flexible, high-performance, scalable, and future-proof data center networking infrastructure at Sharjah Court
Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) has announced that the UAE Ministry of Justice (MoJ), a Federal Government agency, has selected Brocade® switches to modernize the data center networking infrastructure in its Sharjah Court, the biggest MoJ building in the UAE. Additionally, Brocade switches are being used to upgrade the court’s Disaster Recovery (DR) site supporting 13 other branches across the region.
The upgrade has resulted in zero network downtime, while throughput and performance has improved by almost 50 percent. The modernized network is now capable of supporting MoJ’s e-service offerings, which are part of the UAE’s smart government initiatives.
The Sharjah Court was built in 2006, and since that time there has been a huge increase in the volume of transactions every day. With over 1000 people accessing legal services, 1045 notary service transactions, and 66 cases being filed per day, bottlenecks were beginning to develop in the network before the upgrade. MoJ’s system had experienced downtime and the applications running on it had become sluggish. Additionally, most of MoJ’s network traffic was being routed through a data center in Abu Dhabi which, from a networking point of view, was important to offload part of this traffic to the Sharjah site. All of this necessitated an overhaul of the data center.
Nazar Awad El Karim Mohammed Ahmed, head of IT infrastructure division, IT Department, Ministry of Justice explained, “We needed to design new network architecture and implement technology that would support the introduction of new applications and meet our expectations in terms of reliability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. A big challenge was that we had to make sure the workforce, the hearings, and the legal cases would not be affected—and that there was minimum downtime and risk for the Sharjah Court during the installation phase. We had to find the right vendor, the right solution, and the right implementation partner.”
The IT team at the MoJ undertook a comprehensive vendor evaluation process that included putting a tender out through the Ministry of Finance and conducting proof-of-concept testing, and the team ultimately decided on Brocade.
“We had been using Foundry Networks technologies for around seven years and never faced any issues. It’s very reliable, very trustworthy, and the equipment is brilliant. It provided us with all the requirements that we needed from it at that point in time. When Brocade acquired Foundry in 2008, the technology became even better and performed at a much higher level than the competing products that we evaluated. The attractive price points of Brocade technology and value-adds like lifetime warranty on the products were other deciding factors,” said Shiras Majeed, senior networks and security engineer, Ministry of Justice.
In just a week, the implementation was completed by the MoJ network team and Seven IT with support from the technical team at Brocade. It involved a campus solution to replace the core and edge switches of the network. Two Brocade FastIron® SX800 switches were installed to provide campus aggregation and core switching. Thirty-five Brocade ICX® 6430 Switches provided enterprise-class stackable switching at an entry-level price, allowing the MoJ to buy only what it need today and then easily scale user ports and services as their network requirements evolve.
The Brocade technology integrates well with the existing infrastructure. “We have different security layers and different hardware products from various vendors. The need for the switches was to have a technology that could support and be compatible with all the different mixes of technologies. Brocade was the right choice for us – it supports all the products,” said Nazar.
The project has been a big success. “The results prove that we’ve done the right job. End users are very pleased and their feedback was beyond our expectations. They have found the applications are more responsive, and the traffic is speedier and more flexible. At the user level, we reached 100 percent acceptance. Besides, the system is very stable now,” Nazar continued.
“We will continue to work closely with Brocade in the future as technologies and our requirements evolve. It’s a long journey to achieve customer satisfaction and our customers have high expectations,” Nazar stated.
