NITB Pakistan Joins Hands with H3C to Build Future-oriented Hyper-converged Digital Government Base

At present, the global digital economy is in full swing, and digital government is one of the key directions of development. In order to improve government efficiency and realize convenient services for the public, various countries are strengthening the construction of the “Digital Government". A stable and efficient digital infrastructure is necessary for digital government to develop various functions and applications like other industries.

This infrastructure should not only address the current needs, but also adapt to the national development and be oriented to the iteration and upgrade in the longer term. In recent years, Pakistan has begun to explore digital transformation. Its National Information Technology Board (NITB) has joined hands with H3C, to introduce Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) solution to replace traditional IT infrastructures, so as to meet the requirements of digital infrastructure for “stable architecture, flexible deployment, high compatibility and flexible expansion”, which has laid a solid foundation for the digital transformation of government affairs in Pakistan.

HCI Becomes Part of the New Infrastructure for Digital Pakistan

Since its establishment, NITB has set its goal to help the government realize digital transformation. Therefore, NITB has provided diversified supports including infrastructure, software and services, which run through the infrastructure layer, the system layer and the application layer, and has successfully built a government cloud platform. Finally, “Digital Pakistan” has preliminarily taken shape.

Meanwhile, NITB has found that the traditional data center infrastructures can no longer meet the local demands for digital transformation: First, during the process of digitalization, due to the different types of resources, there are so many kinds of devices, providers and complicated infrastructures, so the users have to spend a lot of time and energy on the management; Second, due to poor scalability, the traditional storage can’t be upgraded with the expansion of computing resources. The only solution is to add new servers and storages, which leads to storage fragmentation and frequent occurrence of “silo” phenomena; Third, traditional IT infrastructures require independent networks, storage and computing nodes, and massive redundancy guarantee, which causes rising costs.

In this regard, NITB has tried to apply the Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI). Compared with traditional IT infrastructure, the HCI can fully virtualizes computing, storage, network and other resources for unified deployment. The distributed storage is more flexible and convenient, which can reduces the costs and improve the operational efficiency. Moreover, the cloud native architecture can naturally meets the demand of cloudification for new services in the future, which can prevent digital construction from becoming a “disposable product”.

H3C Stands out With Leading Technical Solutions and Localization Advantages

However, the implementation of the HCI not all went well. During the evaluation, NITB found that most of the HCI solutions in the market cannot provide complete application capabilities, especially the lack of support for unified storage. In addition, the software and hardware compatibility is unsatisfactory, making it difficult to achieve the optimal performance. At the same time, considering the follow-up work of digital transformation, NITB needs providers to develop in Pakistan for a long time and provide localized services and resources, which is also a weak link of most providers.

The ability to provide stable, efficient, convenient and comprehensive digital government services is crucial to the government. After several weeks of technical evaluation and product testing, the HCI solution provided by H3C (H3C UIS) ranked first in the bidding. It is learned that H3C UIS will be delivered with the software and hardware in an integrated way, and software pre-installation and performance optimization will be completed before delivery, which can fully solve the problem of compatibility between the software and the hardware, maximizes the use of all IT infrastructures and resources, and lowers the barriers to apply the cloud in government and enterprises. Besides, the extremely simple management is more friendly to government and enterprise. Furthermore, it can realize quick introduction of new functions, new components and new services, which is conducive to improving the efficiency of business deployment and innovation. It is these advantages that exactly meet the demands of NITB.

In addition, H3C has already set up a dedicated OEM team with rich localization experience in Pakistan, which can provide long-term service and resource support according to the different characteristics and demands of the country, the industries and the enterprises. This is one of the important reasons for NITB to choose to cooperate with H3C.

Creating a Benchmark for Digital Government, Helping Pakistani Government to “Step into the Future”

After winning the bid, procurement, testing and deployment, H3C UIS has brought immediate effect: since the software and hardware of H3C UIS servers are “packaged” and to be delivered to customers, they can run directly. Compared with traditional infrastructures, which need weeks or even months for the deployment, H3C UIS can complete the setup of the cloud computing environment in just 30 minutes and quickly launch services. In addition, as supported by a variety of redundancy mechanisms that can be selected on demand, the H3C UIS system can reach the reliability of 99.999%, ensuring the continuous online operation of government and corporate services. Moreover, the intelligent operation and maintenance makes the operation and maintenance visible and extremely simple, so that the government staff can easily get started and receive early warning of faults as soon as possible, thus providing a strong guarantee for digital government affairs.

Most notably, H3C UIS is scalable and flexible for most forms of storage and computing deployment, which means that if new demands of digital government arise in the future, NITB can quickly deploy corresponding services online to meet the innovation demands of digital government in Pakistan in the next decade. It will be more convenient for local people to embrace the tide of digital transformation and keep up with the pace of global development. According to NITB, they will introduce H3C's object storage and other cloud solutions to bring more digital features to Pakistan.

In fact, the implement and application of H3C UIS in Pakistan proves the ability of H3C to successfully replicate mature technical solutions in China to more countries. According to the market report of IDC, in the Q4 2021, H3C took up the first place in China's HCI market with a share of 24.5%, ranking first for three consecutive quarters. H3C was also listed in the world’s “Top 10 Integrated System Providers” of HCI solution by Gartner Global. As the leader of digital solutions in China, H3C is helping various industries in many countries to complete digital transformation.

Recently, H3C announced its overseas business performance at the H3C NAVIGATE 2022: five new subsidiaries in South Africa, Mexico, Turkey, Singapore, and the Philippines, making the number of overseas subsidiaries 12, nearly 1,000 certified overseas partners, spare parts centers in 24 countries and regions, and service delivery covering 135 countries.

Leading solutions and local ecosystem support have attracted more countries including Pakistan to offer more opportunities, which is also the confidence of H3C's going global. In the future, H3C will continue to export advanced ICT technologies and arouse a “new digital tide” in more countries and more industries.