In the last decade, national development initiatives in Saudi Arabia were based on disparate surveys and snapshots of society in the Kingdom.
However, the Saudi central department of Statistics recently established the National Computer Center to process the third population and housing census project data. Based on a recommendation from Gartner Group, the data processing team for the census project in the National Computer Center chose a Sun Microsystems web-enabled system to underpin the vast amount of data generated by the census.
The National Statistical census project for the Kingdom included a number of pre-operational levels prior to the two week information gathering period, during which each person of the Kingdom’s 22million population was asked to fill out a 60 question survey paper. The team required automated processing tools as part of the solution, to ease the strain of data processing, as well as harnessing technology to support the residential survey, geographic mapping of towns and villages and keeping track of entries from more than 40,000 collaborators on the project.
“We needed to ensure our back end systems were prepared to deal with the amount of information that we were about to receive, and deal effectively with the many stages of the National Statistics Count” commented Mr. Othaim Al-Othaim, Head of Application and Data-entry. “Our main concern was that once the data was collected we were able to sort and collate the data to make it instantly useable for the many government departments that required access to the information for development and planning.”
The decision to implement open source systems rather than the traditional mainframe was one taken after consultation with the Gartner Group, who was asked for independent recommendations before the project was assigned. Sun Microsystems was recommended for its cost effective delivery, efficiency, availability and support services. “We adopted the Gartner recommendations and began implementing the Sun servers and solutions with ease and minimal end user disruption. Within eight months our new datacenter was in production" said Mr. Abdallah Alyosef, Head of Technical Architecture and Operation.
“The Saudi Census Project offered our engineers the chance to work closely with the Gartner and NCC project implementation teams, to secure the best result for the people of the Kingdom” commented Chris Cornelius, Managing Director, Sun Microsystems Middle East. “Harnessing the computing power of the Sun Fire servers to power the Saudi Arabian Census will deliver fast and secure results to the census team, as well as enabling a scaleable infrastructure allowing for future expansion as the population grows.”
The project required one Sun Fire Enterprise 6800 servers and two Sun Enterprise 280R server, as well as 8 Sun T3 arrays and the Solaris Operating Environment Release 10. This reliable, scaleable platform provided secure business continuity for the National Computer Center as well as faster performance.
"The Central Department of statistics now has a state of the art platform to support its future work, and an excellent software system for supporting the ongoing census work and any further statistical research they may do in the future” commented Dr. Gordan Frank , Regional Director, Gartner consulting, Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East “Furthermore, the team can now use this platform to develop custom Saudi Arabian software to support other survey and statistical applications.”
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