MWC Series: Building a Unified Cloud Across Multiple Data Centers with du

Application innovation is at the heart of United Arab Emirate’s digital economy and country transformation. A new era of applications is redefining what data centers are and what they need to support. Today, the data center is no longer a fixed place; it needs to exist wherever data is created, processed and used.

We have teamed up with du, a Telecom provider from Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (EITC) to launch a Unified Cloud Fabric that fuses their state of the art Data Centers across the UAE into a single, cohesive, multi-site, multi-geographical cloud using Cisco’s intent-based data center solution, Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI).

As du drives its transformation agenda to spur expansion into new growth areas, there are applications active at all points on the network, so the data center can no longer be confined to a specific place. It must act as more of a vital nerve system situated where the data is or where the application is conveniently deployed; whether at the edge where new data is generated, or in the cloud where it’s processed. Wherever it makes the most sense to execute at speed.

According to Cisco’s survey of Middle East and Africa enterprise customers in 2017, five times as many visitors as the resident population visit Dubai during the six months of tourism season. This creates a need for flexibility in usage of resources to serve the seasonality, in addition to extreme network agility to offer workload mobility as tourists ebb and flow across the vast geographies of the UAE.

Our ACI Anywhere architecture enables operators to act immediately on data wherever it’s generated or consumed while maintaining consistent policy, with assurance, across the network in a secure manner. All of this must be delivered to apps and data, extending to wherever these go.

Cisco and du at Mobile World Congress 2019

This project further propels du’s digital transformation by enabling them to deliver consistent, highly available service to their customers with unprecedented speed and agility. Their key strategic pillars in driving change include the provision of a seamless customer experience across channels, innovative services and solutions, and agility in operations. Cisco provides the foundation for digital transformation through a new architecture that extends the data center to everywhere that data lives and everywhere applications are deployed.

With our intent-based solution based on ACI, and by specifically leveraging Cisco Cloud ACI and Cisco ACI Multisite Orchestrator, du is able to achieve exactly that, offering their end customers highly differentiated services that scale seamlessly across the UAE geography, and meeting their needs.