Challenges

• Upgrade the Bangladesh Election Commission’s biometric identification and voter registration system to further consolidate citizens’ data, such as fingerprints and photos; improve data security; and reduce administration requirements
• Provide a database capable of registering and storing biometric and alphanumeric information for up to 100 million citizens
• Ensure the database can scale to accommodate around 3% to 5% more citizen registrations per year
• Enable the system to process up to one million input/output processes per second
• Provide a central data center and disaster recovery site to generate voter lists and enable biometric de-duplication
• Support the creation of a national ID card

Solutions

• Included Oracle Exadata X2-2 Full Rack in its identification and voter registration system to provide a reliable, scalable, and responsive database platform
• Enabled the Bangladesh Election Commission to store biometric and alphanumeric data, such as four fingerprints per person, photos, signatures, and contact details, for 100 million Bangladeshi voters across 602 remote locations
• Processed up to one million input/output transactions per second, such as recording voters’ fingerprints and personal details, improving processing speeds that previously were so slow that a single database was not possible and 500 separate databases had to be created per location
• Handled 6,000 concurrent verification queries per second during tests, including matching voters to their fingerprints and photos, which requires the system to process 30 separate requests—including queries in the data subsets—from 100 million citizen records for each verification query
• Improved system performance by 300%, despite using a single database rather than 500 necessary in previous systems
• Avoided the risk of human error and data tampering by developing an integrated reporting solution based on Oracle best practices that enabled the Bangladesh Election Commission to track and analyze how staff across 602 locations used the identification system
• Protected voter information by deploying the identification and registration system in 50 servers to enable deduplication and backup capabilities
• Generated results from identification queries in less than 30 seconds, based on just entering four fingerprints, something that was not possible using previous systems
• Implemented the identification and registration system in just three weeks rather than a few months
• Deployed an award-winning identity management solution with world-class technology and processes that can be used as a role model for the other countries undertaking similar projects

Why Oracle

TigerIT chose Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Exadata Database Machine, and Oracle WebLogic Server as the company believed it would provide the fastest, and most reliable and scalable infrastructure for its voter identification and registration system.

“In terms of speed, availability, backup, security, and business intelligence capabilities, Oracle is the world leader,” said A. H. M. Khan Sohel, IT System Consultant for Preparation of Electoral Roll with Photographs, United Nations Development Programme, and Bangladesh Election Commission (PERP, UNDP & BEC). “It was a logical choice for us to select Oracle Exadata and Oracle SOA Suite to develop a database of this size and complexity.

“Oracle Exadata Database Machine is the most powerful fully configured database machine available. With 14 storage servers and eight database servers it was more than able to underpin our biometric registration voter system and was fast and simple to deploy—we implemented the entire system in just a three weeks rather than in a few months, which is how long previous systems have taken to deploy.”