UUNET SA to host bandwidth for the IEC during municipal elections

UUNET SA will be hosting the bandwidth and domain name for the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to enable automated real-time access to results and information for the upcoming municipal elections on 5 December 2000.

The technology consortium involved in the project includes Andersen Consulting, Microsoft, HP and UUNET SA. As part of the project, UUNET SA has committed to ensuring that the IEC has 1Mb of dedicated bandwidth and a 512K burst line that will dynamically update all the linked servers for the period of 3 - 8 December 2000. In addition, UUNET SA will also be conducting two test runs on the system prior to the election day and during the elections it will be monitoring the service on the IP backbone. Another aspect of the agreement includes UUNET SA working with Elexir Computer Services to implement a Lucent-managed firewall to ensure that the IEC Web site is secure. Lastly, it has also allowed the IEC access to its server room, to ensure that the entire system is fully managed and supported.

"This is a first-time involvement for UUNET SA," says Heather Tonkin, account manager at UUNET SA. "We have the advantage of having worked on similar types of short-burst projects in the past and therefore have an understanding of the technology requirements to ensure reliability in the hosting environment. This project has offered a good opportunity for UUNET SA to further demonstrate our expertise in IP hosting."

HP South Africa, one of the companies which played a pivotal IT consulting role in last year`s national election process, is to supply practically all the enterprise infrastructure equipment for this year`s project. This, says Tony McManus, a consultant at HP South Africa, includes enterprise and departmental servers, networking equipment, workstations and software. "In addition to the simple supply of hardware, we are consulting on the system architecture and are providing on-site professional support over the municipal election period. We are also partnering with UUNET SA to host the IEC`s Web site at the company`s Johannesburg data centre. Again, we will be supplying infrastructure equipment and completely supporting the process."

"This technology consortium has proved successful," says Professor Mandla Mchunu, Chief Electoral Officer at the IEC. "Through this initiative we are able to ensure that the election results are available real time on the Internet. This means that the general public will have access to updated election results as they become available from the IEC internal systems."

For more information, please visit: www.iec.org.za