CPS Energy plugs into reliable
backup technology
HP Data Protector’s flexible scheduling and reliable functionality ensures utility can
mitigate risks to its business-critical data
“After many years of using HP Data Protector in our
environment, I can say that the technology was the right
choice for us. It is reliable, flexible, and enables us to
meet our critical business requirements for ongoing
backups of our SAP and Oracle production systems.”
— Suzanne Shuler, Infrastructure Services and UNIX Supervisor,
CPS Energy
Objective
Support business-critical SAP environment
by protecting data integrity, supporting
fast data restores
HP customer case
study: HP Data Protector
ensures a utility’s SAP
production systems and
Oracle databases can
always be restored
if needed
Industry: Energy
Approach
Leverage easy to use, reliable enterprise
data backup platform
IT improvements
Ease of use•
Restorations easy to perform•
Flexible scheduling allows IT to run •
backups throughout the day
Able to run restores and backups •
at the same time
Able to respond more quickly to •
restore requests
User-friendly interface means database •
administrators, help desk staff can
perform restores if needed
Business benefits
Risk of loss of business critical data •
is minimized
When CPS Energy implemented an Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) environment a decade
ago, the nation’s largest municipally owned energy
utility was able to streamline its business operations
and align its technology more closely to its
business processes.
Today, the new infrastructure supports Oracle and
web-based applications across a variety of functions,
including customer relationship management,
call center services, and online customer account
management. It also provides a foundation for future
technology-based services, such as smart metering
applications to streamline the tracking of customers’
electric and gas usage.
Given the critical nature of these processes,
however, the CPS Energy technology organization
needs to ensure that the databases associated
with the infrastructure are protected against loss or
corruption. For this reason, CPS Energy uses HP Data
Protector software as the backup solution for its ERP
environment and HP Integrity servers with HP-UX to
provide a mission-critical platform. This easy-to-use,
flexible software solution provides CPS Energy
with the functionality it needs to perform ongoing
backups of its ERP system data, and restore that
data quickly when needed.
Rock-solid data backup
CPS, which was acquired by the City of San Antonio,
Texas in 1942, serves a population of 707,000
electric and 322,000 natural gas customers in San
Antonio and surrounding communities. CPS customers’
combined energy bills rank among the lowest of the
United States’ 20 largest cities. The utility also prides
itself on the reliability of its services, its commitment to
renewable energy—16% of its energy is derived from
wind, solar and landfill-generated methane gas—and
its participation in local community service and
charity programs.
“When developers or testers need a copy
of our production environment, we can
give it to them without impacting our
normal backup procedures.”
Suzanne Shuler, Infrastructure Services
and UNIX Supervisor, CPS Energy
Today, CPS runs SAP as its core ERP platform,
It is standardized on HP hardware for its UNIX
environment, including HP Integrity servers, HP-UX
Operating Environment, and HP XP24000/XP12000
Disk Arrays.
As a municipal utility, CPS operates under a unique
combination of constraints and responsibilities. “We
have to move slowly when it comes to implementing
technology,” explains Suzanne Shuler, Infrastructure
Services and UNIX Supervisor, CPS Energy. “We
are publicly funded. We have a responsibility to
our community to exercise great care with how we
allocate our budget.”
In addition to being budget-conscious, CPS Energy
must also consider how its technology choices impact
customer service. “We standardized on HP Integrity
servers running HP-UX because we need to run our
company on a reliable platform end-to-end,” notes
Frank Salinas, Network Administration Analyst.
“We need to ensure that our website and call center
services will be available when customers need to
reach us or check on their accounts. HP Integrity
servers with HP-UX deliver the performance and
reliability we require.”
The utility’s HP-UX environment and HP Serviceguard
Solutions drive infrastructure availability with functions
like automated fault detection. And CPS Energy backs
its systems with HP Mission Critical Services. “We
require a high level of service to reduce the risk that
an outage might impact our customers,” Salinas says.
“With HP Mission Critical Services, we have 24 x 7
support on our infrastructure.”
A final way CPS Energy ensures it fulfills its
responsibilities to its customers is by maintaining
rock-solid data backup processes and technology.
“Our priority as an IT organization is to ensure that
our data is fully protected, and that it can be easily
restored whenever necessary,” Salinas notes. “If we
didn’t have backups, it would be catastrophic for CPS.
All of our financial data is housed in the systems that
the Data Protector backs up. Payroll or customer
billing would be impacted if we lost data. It is
critical that backups occur regularly.”
CPS Energy follows industry best practices for
its backup processes, using HP Data Protector to
perform backups to tape of the utility’s production
systems up to eight times per day—more often for
large production systems than for smaller databases.
Backups may comprise anywhere from a terabyte and
a half to four terabytes of data. They are scheduled
during non-peak hours. Data is backed up to an HP
Enterprise Systems Library (ESL) Tape Library. To meet
the performance requirements of backing up over
96 TBs per week, the team uses direct attached fiber
channel drives to multiple cell managers and media
servers to stream data at very fast rates.
To meet the utility’s disaster recovery (DR) requirements,
the backups are performed across two data centers.
“We have four HP ESL Tape Libraries altogether, with
nine drives apiece,” Salinas explains. CPS has also
split the infrastructure into two master servers (Data
2
Protector Cell Managers). “The SAP environment
is backed up in one cell manager, and the Oracle
environment in the other cell domain.”
CPS Energy backs up its archive logs to both sites
simultaneously, ensuring that if necessary it could run
from either site. “For disaster recovery purposes, if
we need to roll back a database it doesn’t matter
what site we pull the data from,” Salinas notes.
The other backups alternate their site designations
on a day-by-day basis.
Reliable, flexible, and intuitive
user interface
CPS Energy chose the HP data backup solution
in part because of its overall relationship with HP,
which is a strong one, but also because of the
solution’s functionality. “HP Data Protector works
extremely well,” Shuler says. “It is very reliable.
And it lets us run restores while our normal backup
load is also running, which is crucially important to
us, because we don’t have to postpone backups to
accommodate restore requests.”
Customer solution at a glance
Primary applications
SAP and Oracle backup
Primary hardware
•HPIntegrityservers
•HPXP12000andXP24000DiskArrays
•HPEnterpriseSystemsLibraryTapeLibraries
Primary software
•HPDataProtectorsoftware
•HPServiceguardsoftware
•HP-UX11i
HP Services
•HPMissionCriticalServices
“We standardized on HP Integrity servers
running HP-UX because we need to run
our company on a reliable platform
end-to-end. We need to ensure that our
website and call center services will be
available when customers need to reach
us or check on their accounts. HP
Integrity servers with HP-UX deliver the
performance and reliability we require.”
Frank Salinas, Network Administration
Analyst, CPS Energy
Another benefit of HP Data Protector is flexibility. The
technology allows the team to easily manipulate its
backup schedules. If an unexpected need for a restore
arises, it can quickly accommodate the new request.
“We can make the new request a priority,” Salinas
notes. “And if for some reason we have to abort a
backup, HP Data Protector automatically returns to
that point when we start it up again.”
Salinas says the technology’s interface is userfriendly. It’s easy to categorize backup jobs, and
to find backed-up databases should a restore be
needed. In addition, the infrastructure services team
can provide limited rights to CPS Energy’s database
administrators, which allows them to perform their
own data restores. This reduces the amount of
time the management team must devote to data
restoration requests.
Shuler and Salinas are investigating extending
HP Data Protector to the company’s Windows®
environment, which they expect will consolidate
the IT staff skill set to one enterprise platform.
Shuler and Salinas also use HP Data Protector to
support other IT processes, such as replicating
the utility’s existing production databases to its
development and Quality Assurance systems.
“When developers or testers need a copy of our
production environment, we can give it to them
without impacting our normal backup procedures,”
Salinas says.
3
CPS Energy will continue to leverage HP Data
Get connected
www.hp.com/go/getconnected
Get the insider view on tech trends, alerts, and
HP solutions for better business outcomes
Protector in the future, as it continues to refine other
pieces of its enterprise infrastructure. The utility is
considering moving to a virtual tape library solution,
for instance, which will allow it to speed up restores.
If they proceed in that direction, Shuler and
Salinas will consider leveraging HP StoreOnce
de-duplication technology.
In the meantime, however, CPS Energy remains
pleased that HP Data Protector ensures it protects the
data the utility needs to serve its customers. “Because
HP Data Protector software is a reliable technology,
we are confident that we are managing risk relative
to our SAP environment,” Shuler says. “It’s precisely
the technology we need and we are extremely
satisfied with the way it supports our backup
processes and requirements.”
© Copyright 2011 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change
without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements
accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP
shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
Windows is a trademark of the Microsoft group of companies.
4AA3-4830ENW, Created June 2011
Loading...