RTA TRANSFORMS ITS AUTOMATED COLLECTION SYSTEM WITH VCE CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

VCE, the pioneer and worldwide leader inconverged infrastructure, announced that Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA)  has selected a VCE Vblock® System for its Automated Collection System (ACS), a contactless smart card scheme for customers using public transport facilities. The cards function as an electronic wallet and customers using public transport services including taxis and parking facilities can pay for their services through a preloaded card.

The VCE Vblock System will form the foundation of RTA’s IT Infrastructure supporting ACS. It will provide a wide range of IT applications including web application, databases and test and development workloads for RTA’s five business segments: clearing and settlement, systems management, scheme operations, and card services and business development.

Struggling with an IT system that is over 9 nine years old, RTA needs a highly available infrastructure for mission critical applications, an IT environment that enables mixed workloads, and most importantly integrates compute, storage and network technologies. Another key requirement is a futureproof solution that enables RTA to retain and maximize its investments, and increase user productivity, scalability and availability while reducing operational complexities and costs.

RTA selected VCE after a thorough evaluation process which found that its solution was the industry’s only true converged infrastructure that could dramatically reduce the cost of its IT initiatives while improving time to market for its applications. The Vblock System integrates state-of-the-art compute, network and storage technologies from Cisco and EMC, as well as virtualization software from VMware. This combination of best of breed components together in a factory-integrated, pre-engineered, pre-configured, and validated platform is a major factor in RTA’s selection of VCE.

In addition, VCE's industry-leading lifecycle management approach will free RTA from the complexity of managing patches and updates from multiple vendors with 96% less downtime. The entire infrastructure will be managed by VCE Vision™ Intelligent Management Software, a systems management tool which provides a consistent, accurate, and common systems view. VCE’s single call support facility will help RTA maintain the highest availability of its system, enhance team productivity, and ensure proactive identification and resolution of any issues.

 “Dubai is one of the fastest growing cities in the world and therefore the provision of high quality transport facilities is absolutely crucial,” said Khaled Al Awadhi, Director of RTA’s Automatic Collection Systems. “The ability to be agile and quickly meet the changing demands of our customers drove our partnership with VCE. During the evaluation, VCE won our trust and we are confident that VCE will deliver a robust, scalable, agile, flexible solution that will address our growing IT needs. ”

“We’re very pleased to be working with the RTA to help transform its data center to deliver critical business outcomes for its ACS project,” stated Said Akar, regional director for Turkey, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Middle East at VCE. “As the leader in converged infrastructure, we work closely with businesses to offer solutions that integrate with existing IT environments and we strive to ensure that this transition to agile infrastructure is as painless as possible by implementing solutions that are custom designed to deliver their technology needs.”