Company Profile: Tucson Electric Power Company
Sector: Energy
Tucson Electric Power Company (TEP), the principal subsidiary of UniSource Energy, is an electric utility with more than 2,000 megawatts of generating capacity serving more than 397,000 customers in southern Arizona. Tucson has provided electric power to Arizona’s second largest metropolis since 1892. UniSource Energy, Tucson Electric’s parent company is publicly-traded on the NYSE.
At the turn of the Millennium, TEP was preparing for unprecedented growth with regard to its need for storage. The Company was using high resolution photographs, which require tremendous amounts of storage space as part of its Geographic Information System (GIS). High resolution imagery used in the GIS is essential to TEP’s mission to provide safe, stable and reliable power to all of its customers. GIS applications are used at the enterprise level for inspections, lightning-strike assessment, field force management, outage visualization and emergency management. In addition, TEP was averaging 60 new or upgraded application projects per year, and because of data center constraints, the Company was planning to virtualize a good portion of its IT infrastructure to increase storage with the adoption of virtual machine technology.
“We couldn’t keep up with our growth,” according to Chris Rima, supervisor of Infrastructure Systems for TEP. “The only way we could meet our growth was to standardize to a single, easy-to-use storage system.”
Remaining cognizant of the fact that TEP had neither the manpower, nor the resources to manage multiple storage solutions, Custom Storage representative Chris Anderson recommended a solution that enabled TEP to share and replicate data easily, efficiently and reliably.
“Based upon Custom Storage’s recommendation, we implemented a solution that quadrupled our storage capacity, while staying well within the confines of our budget and not adding staff,” says Rima. “By taking Custom Storage’s recommendation, we have saved $400,000 in staffing costs alone.”
Who says size and speed don’t matter? TEP backs up 35 TB of data and pushes one Gbps of information in and between its data centers every day. Home directories are backed up five times a day and then replicated from the primary disk to a secondary disk that resides at one of TEP’s two disaster recovery sites. Because TEP’s GIS and outage management systems are required to recover in less than 30 minutes, Custom Storage helped TEP create policies and procedures that allowed applications to mirror every 15 minutes. In addition, TEP’s new systems save valuable administrator time by allowing users to have self-serve access to backed-up CIFS data, while files are stored in their native formats so user can access data directly. Custom Storage also helped TEP migrate from 80 physical Windows servers and a handful of virtual Windows servers to nearly 275 Windows servers (virtual and physical) in less than three years with no net increase in physical servers.
Through consolidation alone, TEP has saved $100,000 a year in maintenance costs, not to mention the $400,000 in staffing costs. In the first year of deployment, TEP achieved its ROI and saved between $1.5 and $2.0 million while avoiding infrastructure costs during an entire two year period. In addition, TEP expects to save another $2.0 million in the next three to five years, roughly 15 percent of its annual infrastructure budget year over year.
