Business issues
Serving the electric and natural gas needs of customers requires substantial infrastructure facilities. Wisconsin Public Service generates approximately 2,000 megawatts of power, utilizing more than 20,000 miles of electricity distribution lines. To keep services humming along, Public Service relies on a high-tech IT infrastructure to monitor, maintain and repair its power generation and distribution network. Public Service operates both open systems (18 terabytes of data) and mainframe (one terabyte) infrastructures and utilizes GIS technology to locate components suffering outages, determine other grid dependencies and dispatch repair crews. The need for high application and data availability prompted the company to implement consolidation projects and consider ways to develop robust business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) capabilities.

Solutions
The IT team deployed a BC/DR solution using StorageTek D178 and D280 disk systems, SilkWorm 12000 directors and FalconStor’s IPStor application to both replicate data and manage the virtualization of the D-Series™ disk systems. For DR testing, Public Service is using IPStor to create snapshots of the data to asynchronously replicate and test data. In the mainframe environment, one terabyte of data was consolidated onto a StorageTek V2X Shared Virtual Array (SVA) disk system. This data is synchronously (production) and asynchronously (testing) mirrored using StorageTek’s PPRC application to a second V2X at the DR site (both data and server hot site).

Financial benefits
In the event of a large-scale outage, the solution will provide a sizable return on investment by helping to maintain or, if necessary, quickly restore customer utility services. By allocating spare capacity to systems, as needed, and consolidating capacity, Public Service is able to avoid capital expenditures. Storage consolidation projects yielded savings in the company’s mainframe environment as well.

Business benefits
By establishing hot sites and utilizing disk vs. vaulted tapes to restore information, the company was able to cut application time-to-restore by 71 percent (from 14 days to four). The data time-to-restore went from a baseline of three days to instantaneous restoration from disk at the hot remote site. By mirroring the StorageTek V2X and pre-staging servers at a DR hot site, their mainframe environment can be up and running within a day following an event.

Technology benefits
Consolidation has allowed WPS to raise storage utilization rates by 100 percent, from the high 40s to the high 80s. And by consolidating to a single platform in our mainframe fabric, it’s much easier to manage as well. A second benefit to the company’s open systems environments is the overall increase in application performance, which improved by an average of 200 percent.