Louisville Water Company Taps EMC

EMC Corporation announced that Louisville Water Company (LWC) has expanded its EMC information infrastructure to consolidate storage and servers, enable faster data backup and recovery, and improve overall IT efficiency.

Located in Louisville, Kentucky, LWC provides over 124 million gallons of drinking water daily to customers Louisville Metro and surrounding communities.

Tony Gregory, Louisville Water Company’s Director of IT, said, "We’ve experienced significant data growth as our employees rely more heavily on our business applications and online data to get their work done.  As a result, we’ve grown from 14 to 32 terabytes, a 228 percent increase, in only one year. Combine that with rampant server growth and reduced budgets, it was clear that we had to get more efficient with our IT resources to meet our business objectives."

Using VMware ESX Server virtualization software, LWC has consolidated 15 physical servers to three servers, which run 40 virtual machines. LWC’s information infrastructure is built on a high-performance EMC Symmetrix storage system supporting Oracle financials, Oracle PeopleSoft human resources and payroll, work order management, Microsoft Exchange email and other applications. LWC also depends on an EMC Celerra unified storage system to consolidate Windows file shares and store and enable access to geographic information system (GIS) files showing pipes, valves, hydrants and other physical elements throughout the water treatment and delivery process. Security videos from eight water treatment plants are stored on EMC CLARiiON networked storage, which is integrated with the EMC Celerra via a gateway.

"We’ve significantly consolidated our server and storage infrastructure with our new EMC and VMware solutions," explained Gregory. "Through this approach, we’ve optimized our staffing requirements and reduced our datacenter floor space and power and cooling costs, which we project will result in a significant payback.  We are also more flexible and responsive because we can quickly add storage and servers to meet real time business requirements, which previously could take days or even weeks."

For data protection, LWC uses EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems and EMC NetWorker software for all of its production and test applications running on physical and virtualized VMware servers. Backup data sets, including virtual machines, are replicated to an additional Data Domain system at a remote location, creating a highly automated disk-based disaster recovery capability. With streamlined backup administration, LWC’s IT staff spends less time monitoring backups and troubleshooting. As a result, they have more time to focus on improving backup and restore processes.

Kevin Kastensmidt, LWC’s Manager of Technical Services, said: "Previously, it took two days to fully backup our environment once a week.  With EMC Data Domain systems and automated backup, it takes less than 24 hours – a 50 percent reduction with more than twice as much data. And incremental backups during the week take only a few hours. We also can restore files much faster and restore virtual machine in minutes."