National Water
Company protects
Case Study
Objective
To unify business processes and
centralise IT services through state of
the art infrastructure and ensure high
availability of critical systems
Approach
Issued RFP to enhance and expand the
IT environment and researched suitable
support contracts
IT Matters
• Supports 99.999 per cent
system availability
• Delivers fourfold increase in
processing speeds
• Reduces backup times from 18 hours
to under one hour
Business Matters
• Unifies more than 150 processes
across all business units
• Provides a scalable solution for future
business growth
• Reduces energy costs and floor space
Saudi water resources
HPE Datacenter Care ensures high
availability of critical systems
Water is scarce in Saudi
Arabia and safeguarding
supplies is the responsibility
of the National Water
Company (NWC). NWC
intends to improve
performance of the entire
organisation in line with the
best practices in a reliable,
and cost-eicient manner.
Challenge
Performance issues
Saudi Arabia is a desert kingdom with
no permanent rivers or lakes and very
little rainfall. Water is scarce and with
the country’s rapid growth, demand is
increasing. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
has embarked upon a strategic initiative to
radically streamline, rationalise and improve
its Kingdom-wide water and sanitation
services and to eiciently manage and
sustain the Kingdom’s natural water
resources. The National Water Company
(NWC) was established as a government
owned statutory company by a Royal
Decree in early 2008.
Case study
National Water
Company
“With the HPE Datacenter Care support, we have the relief and peace
of mind that Hewlett Packard Enterprise is always there. We can be
assured HPE is watching and monitoring the systems and we have a
single point of contact if things go wrong.”
— Hakem Al Sagri, technical support senior manager, National Water Company, Saudi Arabia
Industry
Water utility
Page 2
With over 7,000 employees, NWC focuses
on delivering high quality drinking water,
providing households with water and waste
water connections, preserving natural water
resources and making the best use of Treated
Sewage Eluent (TSE). Its work started in the
major cities of Riyadh, Jeddah, Makkah and
Taif, which represent 60 per cent of Saudi’s
water distribution network, and will soon
include other cities. Eventually, it will provide
Kingdom-wide services.
Riyadh’s mega city is a good indicator of
NWC’s challenges. Its population has grown
from less than 350,000 in 1975 to more than
five million in 2013 and water consumption
has increased from less than 127 million cubic
metres a year in 1975 to more than 800
million in 2013. It depends on two main water
supplies with 64 per cent coming from
underground wells and 36 per cent from the
desalination of seawater.
This is carried out by the Saudi Desalination
Water Agency and the water is distributed by
NWC. Attention is focused on making the
best use of TSE where it’s not necessary to
use potable water. Water is also accessed
from underground resources with wells
up to 24,000 metres deep, then stored in
surface reservoirs.
When NWC was established it decided to
centralise IT and unify business processes
that had been spread across various city
silos before privatisation. It did this by
establishing a main production data centre
and a separate disaster recovery on green
field sites in Riyadh with 20-plus systems
supporting over 150 business processes.
As with any organisation, high availability
of these business critical systems is vital to
daily operations but maintaining reliable IT
platforms is even more crucial for NWC
because they support the water industry’s
core applications.
When originally setting up its new data
centres, NWC had to equip them from scratch.
It issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) to all
vendors in the local and international markets
and Hewlett Packard Enterprise was chosen
to provide servers and storage. However, as
the organisation grew it became evident that
a refresh was needed. Processing power and
storage capacity required major expansion,
backup and restore times were slow and
system management was minimal.
Case study
National Water
Company
Industry
Water utility
Page 3
“One challenge was performance. For example,
we have Oracle RAC with five core applications
on it. We needed solutions that were quicker
with better Input/Output (I/O),” explains NWC’s
technical support senior manager, Hakem Al
Sagri. “We also had the HPE EVA storage which
was good when we first started but faced
heavier utilisation when we grew as a company
and took on more resources and employees. We
were suering slightly from slow performance
and issues around scalability and we didn’t want
to wait until the last minute when it would be
too late. We had to think proactively.”
Solution
Flexible support
After issuing the RFP for the expansion,
NWC chose a converged solution that
includes six HPE ProLiant BL650, eight
HPE ProLiant BL660 and 52 HPE BL460
server blades along with various HPE
ProLiant DL580 and DL380 servers. It
also implemented HPE 3PAR StoreServ
7400 storage with a raw data capacity of
800Tb used with HPE StoreOnce Backup
deduplication software. Virtualisation is
achieved with Microsoft® Hyper-V.
“The decision to stay with HPE was a mix
of several things,” adds Al Sagri. “We saw
3PAR introduced at an HPE Discover event
then HPE technical engineers came and
showed us the specifications and features.
Several discussion and workshops were held
to find the best design that could last for a
number of years. HPE was very supportive
along with its local partner.”
However, NWC needed a proactive
and flexible support mechanism to
protect the environment and ensure
continuity of service.
“When you have expensive, mission critical
systems you don’t want to rely on just
your own knowledge. You need to have
experienced people to support you,” says Al
Sagri. “Although we have some good storage
and system administrators and a very strong
IT team, we needed a partner who could do
health checks. We didn’t want people who
were reactive and would only visit when we
had a problem. Solving a problem after two
days would kill us because the business will
not wait for us. We can’t make an excuse
because in the end we are responsible
and accountable.”
NWC chose an HPE Datacenter Care
contract which provides environment-wide
support tailored to meet the customer’s
specific requirements. Proactive services
include an assigned account team and
assigned account support manager,
enhanced call handling, education, planning
and assistance and rapid response to critical
hardware and software incidents. Reactive
services include six hour call to repair
hardware support, 24x7 four hour response
on hardware and two hour response
on software.
Case study
National Water
Industry
Water utility
Company
Customer at a glance
Hardware
• HPE ProLiant BL650, BL660 & BL680
server blades
• HPE BL460 server blade
• HPE ProLiant DL980, 580 and
380 servers
• HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400 storage
• HPE D2D, VTL, & TL
Software
• HPE IT Service Management (ITSM)
• HPE Application Performance
Management (APM)
• HPE Application Lifecycle
Management (ALM)
• HPE StoreOnce Backup
HPE services
• HPE Datacenter Care
“The speed of our new HPE servers and storage is
four times what we had before, providing a level of
performance that will easily support future growth
as NWC services are rolled out to more cities.”
— Hakem Al Sagri, technical support senior manager, National Water Company, Saudi Arabia
Benefits
The expansion of NWC’s HPE environment
has maximised compute and storage
Better performance
HPE Datacenter Care support gives NWC
the knowledge that HPE is constantly
capacity and performance and by
supporting virtualisation it has reduced
energy costs and floor space.
watching and monitoring its systems and
that there is a single point of contact and a
dedicated team to turn to, enabling it to
achieve in excess of 99.999 per cent
“The actual speed of the new HPE storage
and the servers is four times what we
had before.
system availability.
“Processing power is much faster and the
HPE worked in partnership with NWC to
provide a tailored end-to-end support
package, choosing the right level of
hardware and software support for each
RAM is much better. With deduplication,
using HPE StoreOnce is also much quicker.
A full backup used to take 12 to 18 hours.
Now we can do it in less than one hour.”
device and the assigned account team
provide a single point of accountability
who are familiar with the NWC environment.
NWC could choose the Proactive Services
they required when and where they needed
them and enhanced call handling ensures
rapid response, regardless of the reactive
As NWC expands into more cities and
its responsibilities increase, it now has
the infrastructure to sustain that business
growth and a level of support that helps
keep water flowing for the people of
Saudi Arabia.
support level.
Learn more at
“The flexibility of HPE Datacenter Care
means that we can tailor the service to meet
our exact needs and having HPE working
with us also has educational value because
it increases the experience of our own sta,”
says Al Sagri. “You always have a mentor
with you, teaching you and helping you.
If there is a problem our sta can learn
how to fix it. It’s like having a big brother
who can give you knowledge, experience
and guidance.”
hpe.com/services/datacentercare
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