HPE E7X67A Quick Start Guide

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-eicient 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 eiciently 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 Eluent (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.