Las Vegas Valley Water District

Sun Helps Keep Datacenters Cool, Efficient and Reliable for Fast-Growing Nevada Utility

The Las Vegas Valley Water District is a not-for-profit agency that provides water to Las Vegas and nearby communities. The district helped build the city’s original water delivery system and now provides water to more than 1 million residents in Southern Nevada.

Business Issues

Replicate production database for use by multiple development groups
Improve storage utilization and management
Reduce datacenter power, cooling and space requirements
Optimize efficiency and performance of PeopleSoft and VMware environments

Solution

The district deployed Sun servers and storage technology to improve the efficiency and performance of its replicated Oracle database, VMware and PeopleSoft environments.

Business Results

Improved data replication and management enterprise-wide
Enhanced storage utilization and management
Strengthened business continuity
40-50% improvement in server price-performance for VMware environment
30% reduction in power and cooling requirements for VMware environment

Products/Services/Solutions

Success at a Glance

IT systems help the Las Vegas Valley Water District accomplish an especially challenging mission: providing reliable, quality water to one of the world’s fastest growing communities in a dry desert environment. The expanding customer base and new development and conservation projects have all contributed to an explosion in data and more than 200 applications now used internally for customer service, billing, purchasing, engineering, geographical information analysis and much more.

Building on a Successful Sun Relationship
In 2006, the IT team recognized the need to replicate its Oracle 9i database into different versions for use in multiple application development projects. Each development group needed continuous access to the latest data in order to integrate and test it with their separate applications. Having established a successful relationship with Sun Microsystems as one of its major storage and server system vendors, the district turned to Sun for a data storage and replication solution.

“ Sun gives us high reliability in systems, high availability for our own customers, expert consulting and support, and a completely engineered solution based on strong partnerships with our other vendors. ”

— Greg Hearn, Senior Systems Administrator, Las Vegas Valley Water District

The district evaluated several alternatives, but chose Sun based on the breadth and depth of its technology and services and strong partnerships with Hitachi, Oracle and other vendors that contributed to a complete solution. The solution includes 24 terabytes of virtualized storage on a new Sun StorageTek 9990 system with Sun StorageTek 9900 Universal Replicator software and Hitachi144 gigabyte Fibre Channel disk drives. The storage system copies data to an existing 9990 system at a disaster recovery (DR) site, which uses Sun StorageTek 9900 ShadowImage and Data Snapshot software to create 18 development copies of the Oracle 9i database.

The database copies run on 12 Sun Fire E490 servers with UltraSPARC IV+ processors and the Solaris 10 Operating System. The solution uses Solaris Cluster software in a three-node cluster of Sun Fire E490 servers to assure high availability for the Oracle database. The district is also deploying Oracle PeopleSoft CIS applications linked to its database on Sun Fire T2000 servers with UltraSPARC T1 processors and the Solaris 10 OS.

Managing Data across the Enterprise
The district selected the Sun StorageTek 9990 system for its extreme scalability, reliability and ability to provide virtualization for both its own internal storage and other tiers of storage across a Fibre Channel SAN. The district chose the Sun Fire E490 and T2000 servers based on exceptional price-performance, as well as Solaris Containers to help run multiple applications and database copies on the same server. The district also valued the ability of the T2000 servers to run multithreaded applications with up to three times the throughput and one third the power and space requirements of competing systems.

Following the successful rollout of the database solution, the district chose to migrate its Microsoft Windows VMware environment from eight IBM servers to four Sun Fire X4600 servers with AMD Opteron processors. The district estimates cost-performance improvements of 40-50% with the power-efficient Sun x64 servers, including 20-30% reductions in electric power and cooling costs. Sun Professional Services assisted the district with installation and implementation of the database and virtualization solutions. In addition, Sun Learning Services is helping the IT team create training programs on Sun technologies. Working with Sun, the district is positioned to provide its growing customer base with a vital resource, now and in the future.