A new control room set up by Dubai Municipality will provide pro-active measures to avoid upcoming problems in computer network and help do the planning before the problem arises, reducing stoppages and service outages.
In a press conference held yesterday at Dubai Municipality Central Laboratory, Qassim Sultan, Director General of the civic body, said the control room called the Network Operations Centre, keeps the Information Technology Department (ITD) at the municipality updated on the inventory.
In case of any problem it will notify the ITD where exactly the problem is and help speed up the solution.
"The operations room will provide improved IT service delivery to both internal and external users of the municipality network," said Qassim Sultan.
The press conference was also attended by Mohammed Abdul Karim Julfar, Assistant Director General for Technical Services, and Engineer Abdul Hakim Malik, Director of the Information Technology Department.
Sultan said the municipality embarked on this project to cater to the tremendous growth of the network in the civic body.
He said the municipality has more than 80 applications that are used by internal department users as well as customers. In addition to this there are 87 in the branches along with 70 other systems installed by the body.
"The external customers use 25 e-Government related applications that are dependent on hardware. We have 95 remote sites such as the Dubai Central Laboratory in Al Karama, the Public Transport Department in Al Rashidiya, and the DM offices located at airport, ports and markets."
Mohammed Abdul Karim Julfar said the municipality staff has increased during the past few years and the total number of the municipality users of various services is put at 2,800 plus a multitude of external users of the e-Services.
"They use systems like e-mail, purchase, personnel and Internet browsing etc. This has posed big challenges for the ITD which caters to more than 70 servers and handles 500 network devices. The new centre has been established to retain these servers available all the time."
The municipality has embarked on the e-Government project under the directives of General Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and UAE Minister of Defence.
Engineer Abdul Hakim Malik said the centre with three big plasma screens with all the critical hardware, and services can be monitored by the operators.
"Of the three screens, one will show the DM network and the system will automatically send an SMS to the engineer concerned about the problem as it occurs. The second screen will show the servers, and the third, the most important one, will show the service or application."
Malik said the ITD has selected 16 important services to be included in the project. The screens will use different colours to identify the status of each computer. Green means the service is all right.
Yellow is a warning, while orange means there is a major problem. Red means the problem is critical and black means the service is dead.
Operators will be working in two shifts on working days and one shift on holidays. The project is worth Dh1.38 million.
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