ETSA Utilities, South Australia's primary electricity distributors with 800,000 residential and business customers, faced the task of upgrading its legacy IT infrastructure that hosts the company's ERP system while at the same time improving the processing time of ERP system jobs and increasing the availability of ERP mission-critical systems. In addition, ETSA sought to reduce payroll processing time and improve data load time. The utility found the infrastructure it was looking for in the Sun product line.

Sun recommended, and ETSA implemented, an ERP system based on two Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 servers running the Solaris 10 OS and two Sun StorageTek 9985V Systems. ETSA now uses the Sun solutions to host its ERP environment in both its main datacenter and its business continuity/disaster recovery site.

The business results of this upgrade are as follows:

• Zero downtime since launch in March 2009
• Improved ERP system processing times by 60%
• Reduced payroll processing time and monthly reporting time by 60%
• Reduced data load time from one ERP system to another from 10 hours to three hours

According to Keith Rutherford, Manager of Information Technology, ETSA Utilities, "We used to spend up to 10 hours loading data from one ERP system to another. The new infrastructure has enabled us to speed this up dramatically. It now only takes three hours, which has freed up much valuable time within the IT department, enabling them to work on other projects."

ETSA's experience with its legacy system, also supplied by Sun, left the utility with the sense that Sun could supply a similarly trouble-free infrastructure.

To evaluate and identify a solution that could meet its specific needs, ETSA Utilities worked closely with Sun. “We wanted to be able to replicate our production site in our disaster recovery site,” says James Curran, ERP System Basis Support at ETSA Utilities. “We chose two Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 servers and two Sun StorageTek 9985V systems with nine terabytes capacity each in order to create a mirror image in the disaster recovery center, enabling us to have the highest availability possible for our systems.”

Datacom, ETSA Utilities’ service provider for Solaris Operating System support, helped configure and prepare the underlying Solaris components for the Oracle and SAP installations, which were performed by internal IT employees. ETSA Utilities went live with the new system in March 2009. “Since the system went live, we haven’t had a single outage,” says Curran. “This availability, along with the productivity gains we have seen, has enabled us to deliver better services to our customers — and this has been noticed.”

Rutherford observed that, “The goal with our disaster recovery site is to lower our recovery point objective from 48 hours to less than one hour. The old system simply didn’t have the processing capability to achieve this. With the new system, we believe it is now possible and we are confident we will achieve it later in the year.”

More Information

Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000/M9000 Servers Double Memory Capacity

Sun Blueprints Online: Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series Servers Configuration Concepts

450 GB 15K RPM Disk Drive for the ST 9985V and ST 9990V

New Offerings for the Sun StorageTek 9900 Solutions [...read more...]

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