Enion SA

Power Company Consolidates Five Regional Companies with Sun SAN and Server Technology

With more than 8,000 employees, Enion SA serves approximately 2.3 million customers and has 16 percent of the energy distribution market in Poland. It was founded in 2004 as a result of consolidating five electrical energy distribution companies into one entity that would be able to compete effectively on the open electrical energy market.

Customer Challenges

Consolidate multiple IT systems while maintaining continuous operation
Integrate existing legacy systems
Increase overall system performance, security and flexibility
Create stable backup environment for a new unified system
Boost energy efficiency and open market competitiveness of the economy
Protect environment from side-effects of energy generation and distribution

Solution

This Polish government-run corporation implemented a centralized SAN infrastructure, updated its database server and refreshed its backup environment as part of a consolidation project to integrate five diverse IT systems into one entity.

Business Results

Five regional IT systems consolidated into one entity
50% reduction in backup time
100% uptime achieved since deployment
New SAN architecture integrates legacy systems
Overall performance, security and flexibility improved

Products and Services

Story Details

Energy is key to a country’s economic growth, and prior to 2004, Poland was one of the few European countries with a fragmented energy sector. The country’s power needs were served by approximately a dozen companies, and because of their smaller size, they did not have the capital needed for competing successfully in the open market for electric power. To resolve the situation, the government merged the companies into four large energy groups. One of these groups was Enion SA, the result of consolidating five distribution companies from Poland’s southern region.

An IT planning team was formed of members from each of the five companies. Under the leadership of Leszek Chwalik, Enion SA’s key IT expert, they created a vision document that outlined their goals, standards, procedures and challenges, as well as a phased integration approach that would preserve current technology while introducing more streamlined systems. Special attention was paid to such factors as current expertise in a given technology, analysis of solutions available on the market and the price-performance ratio.

" When it comes to the quality of Sun StorageTek 9985 systems, it must be stated that its operations are excellent. The systems are reliable, and as of now, nothing has ever disturbed the continuous processing of our data. "

— Leszek Chwalik, Key IT Expert, Enion SA

“We spent time performing reference visits, along with detailed analyses, to see how various manufacturers’ systems and solutions actually worked,” says Chwalik. “The best proposal, in accordance with our requirements, was placed by Sun Microsystems.”

During the first phase of the project, the basis of the new infrastructure was a storage area network (SAN) launched in the Kraków region. The SAN is comprised of two Sun StorageTek 9985 systems connected to the network via Brocade switches with redundant connections. To increase security, the systems use mirroring and are placed in separate locations forming interconnected, distinct data processing.

Phase two of the approach was to connect existing Sun StorageTek arrays to the SAN along with auxiliary SATA arrays. Solaris Cluster updates were used in conjunction with Solaris Operating System to increase database server capacity and bring up the rest of the locations on the SAN.

Successive clusters were also launched in the new environment, along with standalone database and Microsoft Windows-based servers. Currently 16 servers, including four clusters, work in the SAN environment.

In addition to a Sun Fire V445 server selected as the central backup server, the corporation purchased dedicated backup software and a proven Sun StorageTek SL500 tape library with LT03 FC tape drives to complete the solution.

By the end of the installation, the new equipment was successfully integrated along with an existing Sun StorageTek tape library. Additional media servers were installed into the central backup system and use of the SAN architecture decreased the backup time of the main database by 50 percent. In addition, there has been no planned or unplanned storage downtime to date.

With the expansion and reorganization of its IT infrastructure, Enion SA enjoys not only high overall performance, security and flexibility, but expansion options for the future. “First we had to ensure continuous operations for the company and data security, then we performed hardware and software updates,” recalls Leszek Chwalik, Key IT Expert at Enion SA. Looking back, we may now clearly state, that this was fully successful.