Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 03 | Page 14

PROJECT LATEST Angola Cables uses Ciena to modernise West Africa Cable consortium As a major investor in the West Africa Cable System consortium, Angola Cables is one of the leading capacity providers for the African West Coast. Angola Cables is also an operator of the Monet subsea cable, an open system, where each consortium member can select the submarine line terminals for its cable fiber pairs, providing customers with greater flexibility and choice of technology. The system is expected to be in service in the second half of 2017. Map of the West Africa Cable System consortium. Angola Cables, a dedicated wholesale carrier, has selected Ciena’s GeoMesh and Blue Planet solutions to support its new service launch on the Monet subsea cable. This 10,556 km route will provide more than 25 Tb/s of traffic on Angola Cables’ network between the US and Latin America’s major business hub of São Paulo, Brazil. Angola Cables’ wholesale customers can utilise this additional connectivity to support bandwidth demands driven by on-demand applications such as over-the-top video and cloud computing. To handle these network demands, Ciena’s 6500 Packet- Optical Platform, equipped with the WaveLogic Ai coherent optical chipset, will provide wavelengths at capacities greater than 200G between Angola Cables’ point-of-presences and without the need for regeneration. Additionally, Ciena’s GeoMesh spectrum sharing capability provides cost-effective connectivity while enabling wholesale customers to manage network traffic without potential disruption from other users on the open cable system. With Ciena’s Blue Planet Manage, Control and Plan software and cloud-based SLA Portal, Angola Cables can better manage and maintain bandwidth and provide customers a real-time view of network behaviors that impact service level agreements. Angola Cables will also utilise Ciena Specialist Services for training and NOC supervision. Fujitsu provides datacentre and tablets for Egyptian census Fujitsu announced that it is supporting the Egyptian government in conducting the first population census to be based entirely on digital processes. Fujitsu will provide hundreds of Stylistic tablet devices plus datacentre services for the collection and analysis of vast amounts of data. Automating and digitalising the census process is expected to halve the time it takes to gather and evaluate data from Egypt’s population of around 94 million, as well as increasing data accuracy and reliability. The Egyptian census takes place every five years. Starting in February and running over several months, the 2017 census is managed by Egypt’s official statistical agency, the Central Agency 14 INTELLIGENTCIO Starting in February and running over several months the 2017 census is managed by Egypt’s official statistical agency. for Public Mobilisation and Statistics CAPMAS. The final report is expected as soon as July 2017, which will represent the fastest-ever turnaround for a census of this magnitude. Fujitsu Stylistic Q555 tablets will be used to collect population data, going door to door visiting Egyptian households. Data will be transferred via LTE, 3G connections, and centrally stored and analysed in the new CAPMAS datacentre in Egypt. The datacentre, which went live in 2016, has been delivered, installed and is being supported by Fujitsu and includes Fujitsu Primergy RX2540 M2 servers and Eternus DX storage systems, as well as Fujitsu Eternus CS800 for backup. The Fujitsu tablets that will be used in the census were chosen for their ability to withstand demanding usage over long periods, and provide all-day operation even under difficult conditions, such as extreme temperatures and dusty environments. Following the completion of the census, the Egyptian government is planning to provide the tablets to schools for educational purposes. www.intelligentcio.com