South East Water

Story Details

South East Water is one of three water retailers owned by the State Government of Victoria, Australia. The company provides water, sewerage, trade waste and water-saving services for residents and businesses in an area that covers approximately 1.3 million people, 600,000 of whom are customers.

In Australia, water suppliers have to balance requirements to promote sustainable water usage, as set by the Government, with the need to maximize business efficiencies to run a profitable enterprise. Along with its commitment to educate the public on water consumption, South East Water has to meet strict guidelines to ensure that its internal processes are environmentally sustainable.

For South East Water, when its customers turn on a tap, they expect water to flow. To meet this expectation for 24x7 availability of water supply and sewage facilities, South East Water adheres to strict service level agreements with its customers. The company is continually seeking ways to improve water supply management, by improving its environmental sustainability, and by minimizing service interruption. This means infrastructure supporting the business needs to be highly reliable, able to cope with significant peaks in demand, and be able to recover quickly when faced with unforeseen disasters.

South East Water had become increasingly reliant on IT infrastructure to support its business processes. This reliance had resulted in a corresponding increase in data storage requirements, with the company expanding its original 30 servers to more than 200 Windows-based servers running a vast array of applications used throughout the business.

Traditional server technology had created further overheads in the form of extended hardware provisioning lead time, resulting in delays of up to six weeks for hardware procurement and installation. This meant South East Water's IT department was faced with pressure to provide a highly available environment, and control its escalating maintenance costs. “Batch processing, backup and general maintenance activities were becoming increasingly time consuming and costly,” confirms Stuart Brockwell, IT Operations Manager, South East Water.

The expanding infrastructure had in turn stretched the limits of the datacenter cooling system, with additional air conditioners and uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) needed. The datacenter was also close to reaching the floor’s weight limit, and any additional infrastructure would have required South East Water to invest in floor strengthening, at a cost in excess of AU$200,000 (US$164,804). The result of its previous IT expansion had led to the datacenter reaching both physical storage and load carrying capacity, and greatly increased power consumption.

South East Water looked for a long-term IT solution that would provide the flexibility needed to grow its business and help to reduce the strain on existing physical resources. The company turned to its long term partner of seven years, Sun Microsystems, for help in providing a solution for upgrading its datacenter operations, reducing the environmental impact of its operations, and overhauling its disaster recovery ability.

South East Water was located within a confined area with no immediate room for expansion, which meant any new technology had to deliver efficiency and scalable performance gains within the constraints of the existing space.

“As one of our goals was to reduce our environmental impact, choosing a vendor with green credentials was an important factor. But we also needed a vendor that could deliver the performance we needed at an attractive price. Sun was able to fulfill both these criteria and quickly became the obvious choice,” explains Marcus Darbyshire, CIO, South East Water.

South East Water replaced its existing backup infrastructure with a 143-slot Sun StorageTek SL500 Modular Library System, populated with six Sun StorgeTek LT0 3 tape drives. The company's existing Sun StorageTek 9970 system was also replaced with a three-tiered data storage solution based on a 17TB Sun StorageTek 9985 system and a 13TB Sun StorageTek 6140 array which provides second and third tier storage. Sun StorageTek 9990 Universal Volume Manager is used to virtualize a portion of the 6140 behind the 9985 system, and ShadowImage In-System Replication software to create multiple copies of 9985 system data and simplify the data recovery process. Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager provides storage management for the unvirtualized portion of the 6140 array. Cisco MDS9124 SAN Switches provide connectivity for the StorageTek 9985 system, 6140 arrays and SL500 library.

To address the need for robust disaster recovery, South East Water implemented a 20TB StorageTek 6140 storage array featuring tiered disk storage, and an StorageTek SL500 Modular Library System. Both are housed at the company’s disaster recovery site. The backup and disaster recovery solution was financed through Sun Global Financial Services and is covered by a SunSpectrum support agreement. “The Sun team understood what we were trying to achieve and provided us with an excellent solution,” comments Marcus Darbyshire, CIO, South East Water.

The new tiered storage solution is light, efficient and compact enough to fit the physical constraints of the company's datacenter, while providing the performance and reliability needed to meet business demands. It has also allowed South East Water to gain greater value through better utilization of available storage, while providing a scalable solution that could grow to meet business demand. With the new disaster recovery solution, South East Water has reduced the recovery time for its top 20 business processes from between six to ten weeks to less than 24 hours, and cut its backup window from an average 12 hours to less than eight hours.

Overall, the company has improved customer service levels and reduced operational costs and power requirements. “Not only has Sun helped extend our service times, but we have significantly reduced maintenance costs,” said Marcus Darbyshire, CIO, South East Water. The new Sun storage backup and disaster recovery solution will help enable South East Water to continue to deliver excellent service to its customers without the need for significant additional investment. “We now have a simple, cost effective and robust environment with enhanced capabilities that will scale to meet the needs of the business.”