H3C Empowers FBISE’s Educational Informatization with HCI, Enhancing its Operational Efficiency

The rapid development of global digital economy has exerted a profound impact on education methods. Facing ever-increasing service demands and massive user data in the case of high concurrency, educational institutions must improve the application level of informatization. Therefore, it is ineluctable for them to introduce new technologies and new products to carry out digital transformation. High-performing IT infrastructure is considered a crucial means to empower such institutions to upgrade in an all-round way as it integrates software, hardware, and digital technologies.

Recently, The Federal Board of Intermediate & Secondary Education (FBISE) Islamabad collaborated with H3C to introduce the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution and enhance the former’s IT infrastructure with new installations such as servers, switches, and firewalls, which meets the demands of the official website such as data storage and backup, limited connectivity and limited traditional infrastructure extension, and substantially improved the operational capabilities of FBISE.

Enable Data-centric Agile Deployment of HCI to Meet Current and Future Demands

FBISE is an autonomous institution of the Minister of Federal Education and Professional Training Pakistan, empowered with administrative and financial authority to organize, regulate, develop and control Intermediate and Secondary Education in general and conduct examinations in the institutions affiliated with it. E-services it provides, as Institute Affiliation System, Computer Based Marking (e-marking), Digital Attendance Management System (DAMS), Online services( Appointment, Migration, Duplicate Mark sheet, Document Verification, Result cancellation), are all available on its official website.

With a growing number of service scenarios and continual changes in its environment, FBISE is confronted with exponential growth of back-end data and a lack of computing and storage resources in its working system. It also relies on third-party services. Along with these, there are a variety of other issues: Its hosting services are pricey; its physical machine environment is incapable of virtualization; its data backup mechanism is inadequate; and real-time reporting is unavailable. In order to ensure effective collaboration for most end users in the industry, FBISE hopes that the solution can build a virtualized and centralized management platform, a wired/wireless network with 10G fiber backbone and edge security. It also hopes that the solution will be compatible, flexible, and suitable for its own development in the next decade.

More and more examples demonstrate that HCI is the mainstream solution to establishing a data-centric agile environment. It is a software-defined data center that integrates physical hardware, compute and storage capabilities, and online virtualization services while isolating applications and virtual machines from the underlying hardware. With ten years of HCI market expansion, H3C consistently prioritizes the applicability and usability of products and technologies, and actively caters to user needs. The solution has been successfully verified in numerous of scenarios in varies industries.

The Operational Platform Fully Evolves

Through several rounds of technical evaluation and product demonstration, H3C's solution has become FBISE's final option. In addition to a shorter delivery time, this solution is strongly inclusive, and able to integrate all storage formats and all computing deployment methods to provide a more stable architecture and ensure reliable and long-lasting services.

At the hardware level, the end-to-end infrastructure is provided. Equipped with hardware servers, HCI software and pre-installed node software to ensure high performance Meanwhile, the aggregation of enterprise-level servers, core and aggregation switches, next-generation high-performing 10 gigabit firewalls, next-generation enterprise-level multi-service wireless controllers, indoor/outdoor Wi-Fi 6 access points and a centralized management platform can manage the infrastructure intelligently.

Computing, network, storage, security, and O & M components that integrate HCI enable all features of the data center to run within one interface. At the technical level, the cluster redundancy is improved and three nodes are set up. All computing and storage nodes are integrated to shape computing and storage resource pools. Both pools are part of a single cluster and have redundancy that can improve the system's reliability. While sparing some resources for HA clusters, we the primary node, the standby node, and the monitoring node are set up to maintain the integrity of the system and ensure that computing resources available are enough to run the virtual machine smoothly without any data loss in the event of a node failure.

This solution is realized based on the collaboration of software and hardware. It is highly secure, and features great storage and bearing capacities, and can support the connection and storage requirements of the official website in various scenarios, realizing all-round evolution.

Localized Operations Guarantee Deployment of HCI

H3C has a strong OEM team in Pakistan well-experienced in localization, which ensures that the project team can complete upgrading and deploying FBISE's information platform in a short period of time. This has been highly recognized by FBISE especially for the applicability, extendibility, and cost-effectiveness of the upgraded website that makes it easy for infrastructure management and subsequent deployment.

The network has been made effective. H3C’s fiber backbone processes 10G fibers, enabling new network D aggregation switches and POE+ access switches with 10G backhaul. Moreover, Tolly Group, a top global provider of testing and third-party validation and certification services, has verified H3C's Wi-Fi 6 devices, which comprise indoor/outdoor access points. At present, as the network connection between FBISE and affiliated institutions has been improved, FBISE can provide direct services that cater to the demands of affiliated institutions and upload their examination results in real time.

The storage and backup have been optimized. Equipped with the HCI solution, FBISE's official website can integrate all storage formats (including blocks, objects, and files) and all computing deployment methods (including virtual machines, virtual desktop infrastructure, containers, features, and bare machines) with a storage capacity of 30 TB, which is enough to cater to technical needs of the next decade. Especially once the H3C ONEStor Distributed Storage License is included in the solution, three data backup mechanisms can be used to protect data on all three HCI nodes, store available data in the right time, and back up them in secondary storage.

The real-time reporting is now possible. The solution integrates H3C’s heterogeneous network management system (NMS) to which all alarms are sent for real-time monitoring and reporting. The management system enables visualized and simplified O & M, and the built-in AI algorithm predicts CPU, memory and storage capacities and timely reports failures to ensure smooth running of the website.

It is worth mentioning that, compared with traditional architecture, H3C’s virtualization improves resource utilization, and saves a lot of space in the data center by harnessing computing and storage nodes. It finally increases operational efficiency and lowers operating costs.

Based on leading solutions and localized development strategies, H3C steadily expands its business into overseas markets, and makes its services available in 135 countries. This fully demonstrates the commercial value of information technology. In the future, H3C will continue to focus on user needs, lead the development of IT infrastructure, and propel transformation and development in the digital era.