Overview
By using our tested and proven infrastructure hardware and validated solutions, customers and partners can accelerate their time to value, while reducing the risk of complex implementations and multisite deployments. Repeatability and scale are built into the joint offerings, allowing implementation to start small and local, and then rapidly expand globally.
Challenges for city IT administrators
Lack of a robust and agile city IT infrastructure limits the capabilities of city administrators to leverage the full potential of the various solutions being implemented. Smart city initiatives involve multiple technology providers and system integrators. The IT infrastructure must be able to cater to the demands of all kinds of applications. Some of the challenges that IT administrators face in a smart city implementation include:
- Scalability
- Security
- Data storage and processing
- Integration
Scalability
Infrastructure solutions that are not scalable limit the city from realizing the outcomes at the larger scale. Cities usually start implementing newer solutions as pilots catering to a smaller area. However, as the pilots generate outcomes, these solution deployments can be rapidly expanded to cater city-wide. This expansion results in generating enormous amounts of data. The need for compute capability also increases. The infrastructure supporting these solutions must be capable of scaling up vertically and horizontally while maintaining efficiency.
Security
In a digital city context, security and privacy are among the most important aspects to consider while designing newer solutions. It is of paramount importance to the city to secure and protect the data that is related to its citizens. Thus, the infrastructure driving these solutions must have an intrinsic security capability to support various levels of data protection. Some of the key security features needed at the infrastructure layer are encryption, secure boot, signed firmware upgrades, audit logging, and alerts.
Data storage and processing
As cities continue to implement newer smart solutions, the amount of data being generated increases enormously. It is critical to have a robust and scalable data storage solution that could support multiple types of data that must be processed and stored at varying scale and speed. Many of the digital city solutions are governed by regulations and policies that are related to the storage and processing of the data. The data systems must be able to support capabilities such as long-term archival, role-based access, geographic distribution, and encryption.
Integration
It is common for cities to have several siloed applications deployed independently of each other. This type of infrastructure limits the ability of the city administrators to realize additional value from combining insights from multiple solutions. There are tremendous possibilities in bringing together data and insights from multiple solutions, which opens a new dimension to the value of city data. A centralized view of everything happening across the city gives situational awareness and helps prepare city services to respond to incidents happening on the ground. This solution needs a strong integration capability, both at the application and infrastructure layers. The ability to deploy multiple types of workloads on the same infrastructure makes integration efforts smoother and quicker to achieve.
Solution
Dell Technologies helps address each of these challenges through the wide range of infrastructure products in our portfolio, complementing these products with predefined reference architectures and lab validated solutions.
Such compute intensive workloads need high performing hardware resources and the right architecture to derive the best outcomes at high efficiency. The Dell Technologies portfolio of servers, storage and HCI infrastructure partnered with ISS provides an optimal reference architecture for the video analytics solution. Based on the deployment models needed, the solution can either be deployed closer to the edge using the ruggedized PowerEdge servers such as XR11/XR12, or at core data centers leveraging PowerEdge R750 servers or VxRail HCI.
