Benton Public Utility District

Story Details

It’s happened to almost everyone: you call a company to get something done, and encounter long, agonizing pauses while the rep waits for the computer system to process information. The company’s productivity and standard of customer service drops—and so does its reputation.

Providing excellent customer service is a key goal at the Benton Public Utility District (Benton), in southeastern Washington. Benton has migrated its Oracle PeopleSoft applications to browser-based versions as part of an effort to stay current with PeopleSoft technology and enhance customer service. It’s also supporting a growing region: 163 employees now serve 45,000 customers.

The overall result was that the performance of key applications degraded. Was the problem in the new software—or in an overtaxed infrastructure?

Sun business partner General Microsystems, Inc., based in Bellevue, Washington, presented Benton with a tool for finding out fast: Sun’s “Try and Buy” program. Randy Mills, supervisor of information systems at Benton, used the program to replace Benton’s Sun Fire 3800 server with three Sun Fire T2000 servers. Benton had been a Sun customer since 1999. “I’m not sure if we would have investigated the server side first,” Mills remembers. “But with Sun’s Try and Buy program, it was easy to try a Sun Fire T2000 server—and the result was a 50 percent improvement in key customer service processing times.”

Customers who paid bills in person, for example, saw a 10 to 15 second wait for processing cut to 5 to 7 seconds. “Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of repetitions a day,” Mills says, “and it’s a substantial productivity gain for staff and customers.”

Benton bought three Sun Fire T2000 servers. One runs Oracle’s PeopleSoft ERM application. A second runs PeopleSoft Financial Management. A third runs PeopleSoft Human Capital Management. A planned geographic information system (GIS) will run on a fourth T2000 and provide map information to other Benton applications.

Along with the T2000s, Benton deployed a Sun StorageTek 6140 array to replace its Hitachi Data Systems 9500 V system. The team chose the Sun system because it cost effectively provides easy management from any Web browser, easy scalability, and four gigabytes of cache for better connectivity to Benton’s storage area network (SAN).

The StorageTek 6140 also allows Benton to intermix Fibre Channel and SATA drives. “We have a large quantity of image files that we don’t use much,” Mills says, “and if we put them in a tiered storage environment on SATA storage, we’ll save about 50 percent on disk costs.”

When upgrading to Sun Fire T2000 servers, Benton also moved from Solaris 8 to Solaris 10 Operating System. “In Solaris 10, we like the easy memory management,” Mills says. “There are fewer parameters to set to make Oracle work.” Benton had switched to Solaris back in 2000, moving from an IBM AS/400 to a Sun, PeopleSoft and Oracle solution.

Benton’s three T2000s, at 2u each, represent a 70 percent space reduction from the Sun Fire 3800, which took up 20u with its power supply. “I haven’t yet measured the power reduction due to the T2000’s CoolThreads technology, but I know it’s substantial,” Mills says. “And our annual maintenance costs are cut in half with the new servers. Maintenance savings alone will pay back our investment in five years.”