Powerco is New Zealand's second largest electricity and gas distribution company, with a network area spread across the upper central and lower central North Island. The company services approximately 410,000 consumers, representing 46 percent of the gas connections and 16 percent of the electricity connections in New Zealand.

Households, businesses and industries throughout the North Island depend on Powerco to deliver reliable electricity and gas services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A robust and secure data management system is essential to Powerco’s business to ensure systems run smoothly and customers receive continuity of service.

Powerco was using both Oracle RAC (‘Real Application Clusters’) and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to support applications running on either one platform or the other. This meant the business faced the expense of licensing, maintaining and supporting two systems, as well as the added complexity of working across two different platforms.

It also required staff, or contractors with the technical knowledge, to administer both Oracle and SQL Server systems.

With Powerco’s Oracle platform approaching the end of its warranty cycle, and a major upgrade of the financial system scheduled, it made sense for the company to reassess its server solution and decide whether it should replace existing hardware or consolidate to a single server platform.

Powerco recognised that consolidating database platforms would simplify its IT environment and significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of the database management system.

“The case for consolidation was simple – why maintain two systems if you don’t need to?” says Huw Griffiths, Infrastructure Manager, Powerco.

In-house knowledge
Having assessed the situation internally, Powerco sought the assistance of SQL Services, a Microsoft Gold Partner database management consultancy, to assess, plan, design and build the SQL Server 2005 environment. As SQL Services offered management and support for both Oracle and SQL Server platforms, the company had the expertise to ensure the migration to SQL Server would run smoothly.

SQL Services Senior Technical Consultant Kevin Nicholas performed a site review of the existing solution and developed five different scenarios for the server configuration with an analysis of the technical pros and cons of each.

SQL Services also worked on developing, testing and staging environments for SQL Server, to ensure that Powerco had a large and robust database environment to test and stage applications before putting them into production. This allowed Powerco to manage and maintain the server platform in-house.

“The ability to manage the database management systems internally was important to Powerco, as it allowed the business to retain more knowledge in-house and reduce reliance on external consultants,” says Peter Cary, Business Development Manager, SQL Services.

More to come
Powerco decided to migrate to SQL Server as part of the upgrade process for applications over a one-year timeline.

Although a project requiring continuous system availability delayed the migration of Powerco’s GIS systems, full system migration is on target for completion in October 2009.

Even before full consolidation has been completed, Powerco has realised significant benefits from the migration from Oracle to SQL Server, and when the GIS system is migrated further performance gains are expected. The business now has a more streamlined and efficient system with improved integration and security and reduced TCO.

“We’ve saved a significant amount of money, almost $390,000 a year, in consolidating. We’ve been able to save on rack space, reduce hardware, maintenance and licensing costs and have created numerous efficiencies through simplifying the server environment,” says Griffiths.

From disjointed to orchestrated
Through migrating to a single server platform, Powerco has achieved a more integrated and streamlined system. “Getting information from one database to another is greatly simplified without the need for Oracle translations.

We are now moving towards a much more integrated infrastructure overall. Three years ago, our systems were more disjointed and separate. We now have the single server platform and Microsoft BizTalk Server orchestrations take data between the GIS and the JDE databases. This allows people to use existing data rather than creating ad-hoc databases to get the information they need,” says Griffiths.

Powerco’s database consolidation has eliminated the need for two Oracle database administrators, which enabled Powerco to reorganise its IT department and re-assign these administrators to other areas.

In the longer term, eliminating the need for specialist technical expertise will make it easier for Powerco to resource its IT requirements in-house.

“SQL Server is based on Windows so we can hire staff with more generalist skills to manage the environment. We no longer need to hire technical contractors or consultants with specialist skills based on HPUX,” says Griffiths.

Upgrade on the horizon
Database consolidation has also enabled Powerco to eliminate many costs. There’s no longer the need to maintain hardware for the Oracle environment, such as UNIX servers or HPUX boxes and the business has benefited from reduced licensing costs and rack space.

“SQL Services identified areas of server sprawl in their assessment of our systems. We had a number of SQL Servers, which have been consolidated down to two, reducing our licensing, management, operational and back-up costs,” says Griffiths.

With a more streamlined, integrated and efficient server platform in place, Powerco is now looking to upgrade to Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The business is already running Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in a test environment and will soon be able to utilise the integrated Business Intelligence features in the 2008 version, such as user-friendly analytics, reporting, planning and budgeting tools all integrated with Office.

For more information
> SQL Services
www.sqlservices.com
Ph 0800 696 111


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