System Assures Critical Customer Service Functions Through Remote Copy of Critical Data Even in the Event of a Disaster
SANTA CLARA, California - 6 September, 2000 — When a hurricane is storming toward the west central coast of Florida, most Tampa residents begin to prepare for the worst. TECO Energy's 800,000 utility customers, however, can breathe a little easier because for the past two years, the company has been using a disaster recovery solution supported by storage systems and storage management software provided by Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), to safeguard vital operational and customer service data.
As its first line of protection, TECO Energy maintains a real-time remote copy of all production data at an alternate data center located eight miles away from their main facility in Tampa. They have one Hitachi Freedom Storage™ 7700E system in the main data center in Tampa which is connected by fiber to a second 7700E in Tampa Electric Company's Energy Control data center in nearby Palm River. From there, the data is sent periodically to a third-party disaster recovery specialist in Philadelphia. TECO Energy's systems are fully operational from either of the two sites in the event of a disaster.
According to Ernie Giudice, supervisor for information systems support for TECO Energy, TECO Energy decided to implement the disaster recovery strategy and at the same time replace obsolete equipment. "We evaluated Hitachi Data Systems as well as other vendors," Giudice said. "When we looked at our requirements for reliability and pricing, along with the ability to increase production time, provide remote copy, and support our technology, we chose Hitachi."
In the event of an anticipated disaster, like a hurricane, TECO Energy immediately begins sending data from the Energy Control data center to Philadelphia. The entire system can then be run from Philadelphia if the Tampa systems are incapacitated. This procedure is tested twice each year by completely disconnecting the Tampa storage system and actually running TECO Energy's information systems remotely from Philadelphia.
Disaster recovery, however, is not just about hurricanes and predicted disasters, said Giudice, but also unanticipated disasters such as a large fire that started recently just a few blocks from TECO Energy's primary data center. "A fire that occurred here in May was two blocks away from us." Giudice explained, "We immediately verified that the data was successfully transmitting between our data centers. The next step would have been to inform our disaster recovery provider in Philadelphia to start transmitting data. We never actually got to that point because we had a good comfort level knowing that the data at our alternate data center was current up-to-the-second."
Disaster recovery is not the only benefit TECO Energy saw after implementing the Hitachi Data Systems solution. According to Giudice, TECO Energy has also been able to improve customer service as a result of the increases in performance. "We saw improvements in our production run times and because of that we've been able to extend our service levels for our customer billing systems," Giudice explained. "For instance, by cutting two hours off the billing run, our customer service representatives are able to stay on the system two hours longer. In the past we were forced to shut down the online system at 7 p.m. Now we leave it up until 9 p.m. and still get our nightly processing done in time to meet morning service levels. This is good for our relationship with our customers as well as being good for business."
Disaster recovery is handled by two Freedom Storage 7700E systems, running Hitachi Remote Copy software. The 7700E systems are managed by Resource Manager 7000 software, and Hitachi Graph-Track™ provides real-time performance monitoring and analysis. TECO Energy also purchased a Hitachi Pilot Series™ server from Hitachi Data Systems.
TECO Energy is a diversified energy-related holding company headquartered in Tampa, Florida. Its principal businesses are Tampa Electric, Peoples Gas, TECO Transport, TECO Power Services, TECO Coal, TECO Coalbed Methane, and Bosek, Gibson and Associates.
Committed to helping customers exploit the value of information technology for success in the Internet economy, Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), is a leading provider of business solutions for the world's most information-intensive corporations. For further information on Hitachi Data Systems, access www.hds.com.
Hitachi, Ltd., headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is one of the world's leading global electronics companies, with fiscal 1999 (ended March 31, 2000) consolidated sales of 8,001 billion yen ($75.5 billion). The company manufactures and markets a wide range of products, including computers, semiconductors, consumer products and power and industrial equipment. For more information on Hitachi, Ltd., please visit Hitachi's Web site at http://www.hitachi.co.jp.
1 At an exchange rate of 106 yen to the dollar.
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