Business issues
The driving rain and hurricane-force winds made Mike Oller nervous. The fury of the storm could cause wide-spread outages in the Houston, Texas, area. The Dynegy Inc. Vice President of Infrastructure was concerned. He began making mental notes of all he would have to do to restore operations in the event of a failure. Bobby Le Blanc was also concerned. The Business Impact Analysis (BIA) report sitting on his desk projected millions in losses to the company should Oller fail in his mission to maintain continuous operations. The Senior Director of Business Services balanced the risks against the costs to deploy a business-continuity-assuring infrastructure. It was a no-brainer. He began formulating his presentation to senior management to secure funding.

Solutions
The hurricane and the BIA prompted Oller and Le Blanc to move the wholesale and retail energy producer's production environment to a hardened facility. They established criteria to select storage devices able to support their business continuity (BC) plan. Dynegy deployed StorageTek L180 and L700 libraries at the Wells Fargo Plaza site and one L5500 at the CyrusOne facility. The L180 and L700 libraries are populated with StorageTek T9840 tape drives. The L5500 is equipped with both LTO and T9840 tape drives. The new drives deliver much greater capacity than the company's previous solution.

Financial benefits
Dynegy realized a total cost of ownership for the tape storage solution that was 28 percent less than the others they considered.

Business benefits
Dynegy significantly bolstered its business continuity capability with the relocation of its production environment to a hardened facility. The StorageTek L5500 delivers the Nearline HSM data management and backups necessary to provide rapid changeover of business operations in the event of an outage.

Technology benefits
"The StorageTek tape libraries enabled Dynegy to implement 'lights out ' backups," said Oller. Previously, administrator intervention had been required. And with the greater capacity of LTO and T9840 tape media over its previous solution, 20 percent fewer tapes are required - simplifying Dynegy 's management tasks.