Information technology from New Horizon System Solutions

Energy Processing Canada, Mar/Apr 2002

Launched in February 2001, New Horizon System Solutions provides information technology solutions to the utility and energy sector by leveraging a state-of-the-art data centre and application expertise. Current customers include Ontario Power Generation, Bruce Power, Management Board Secretariat and Toronto-based Mount Sinai Hospital. NHSS employs more than 600 information technology professionals at three locations across Ontario.

Ontario Power Generation (OPG) was the primary energy provider in the province of Ontario. When the Ontario government decided to deregulate the electricity market and allow competition, Bill 98 mandated OPG to "decontrol" its assets to power. its monopoly power.

The decontrol meant OPG had to reduce its energy generation from 85% to 35% over a 10-year period. OPG leased the Bruce Nuclear Power Plant, a large nuclear power station located in Tiverton, to Bruce Power on May 15, 2001. This change in plant control necessitated the split of all information technology (IT) systems in order to provide Bruce Power with IT services required to support a standalone enterprise. Bruce Power would be working on the OPG information systems one day and their own systems the next.

With the electricity market scheduled to open in Ontario in spring 2002, NHSS had to quickly find a reliable, robust disaster recovery infrastructure for its two major clients.

NHSS needed a solution that was instantaneous, reliable and scalable.The idea was to create one primary site for each customer, with each site acting as the disaster recovery site for the other. Remote disk mirroring of critical systems has allowed for successful implementation of this vision.

Disk mirroring provides the highest data availability for mission-critical applications by creating two copies of data on separate storage systems at geographically separate locations.

"We deal with a lot of data," says NHSS Chief Information Officer Liz Reid. "Once energy is generated, it can't be stored like gas or oil where the price can fluctuate from day to day. It has to be traded in realtime. We needed a system that was highly available - 99.999% - and would use remote disk mirroring to achieve those results. EMC's SRDF solution was the only one on the market that could offer us the reliability and functionality we needed!

THE EMC SOLUTION

EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) software helps companies manage planned data centre events such as scheduled maintenance, daily backups, migrations, application testing, as well as recovery from unplanned outages.

The online, host-independent, mirrored data storage solution duplicates production site information on one or more physically separate target Symmetrix systems. These systems can be across the room, around the globe, or anywhere in between. But no matter where they reside, SRDF business continuance enables companies to realize 24/7 revenue generation and customer service capabilities for increased competitive advantage.

In March 2001, NHSS installed SRDF and split OPG's environment into two mirrored sites: one for the decontrolled OPG and one for Bruce Power. The migration, involving 1.5 terabytes of data, was completed in just six hours on the actual closing day of the OPG/Bruce Power transaction - something that could never have been achieved with traditional tape solutions.

"Had we used tape, the migration of OPG critical systems to the Bruce Power equivalents would have taken a minimum of three days," says Tom Cole, Manager, Enterprise Servers and Storage at NHSS. "Bruce Power would have had to operate without its critical information management systems on the day of the transition and work without access to Work Management, Material, HR and Finance data until the migration was completed. It was a huge undertaking to move and replicate a large number of systems in a very short period of time. EMC SRDF enabled NHSS staff to reduce the business impact to both OPG and Bruce Power."

Power plants differ from regular business models, explains Cole, in that the online systems for managing a power plant are most critical when the plant shuts down for maintenance work. The plant relies on these critical information systems to ensure that the proper work maintenance orders are scheduled and completed during the "outage." If the system used for planning and scheduling is not available during a plant outage for any reason, the length of the maintenance window could be extended, a situation which is unacceptable to customers.

Prior to using EMC's software, NHSS's IT/IS team often spent 24 to 36 hours completing software upgrades. But SRDF enables the team to now conduct major upgrades on the mirrored sites within an hour or two, further eliminating long maintenance outages.

RESULTS TO DATE

Today, SRDF is operational on NHSS's IBM OS/390 mainframe environment which runs INDUS Passport, on the HP/UX running PeopleSoft and SAP, and on Windows 2K running SAP.That totals 10 terabytes of data available at both customer sites and mirrored to each disaster recovery site. NHSS is in the midst of deploying a Network Information Storage strategy. The company is developing a complete storage-area network (SAN) environment and has turned to EMC once again for its highly available information storage and management solutions.