"Челябэнергосбыт" created DPC for management systems for power data and billing

Over 1.3 million private consumers and nearly 39 thousand legal persons in Chelyabinsk region are clients of JSC Chelyabenergosbyt – the guaranteeing electricity provider in this region. Daily in branches of the company 76 thousand indications from accounting systems, the network organizations, the controllers given to the receipt, SMS services and from personal accounts of consumers are flown down. The total amount of corporate data reaches 40tb. The most part from them is processed by two key applications: management system for power data of Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management and system of billing Oracle Utilities Customer Care & Billing. They are responsible for commercial accounting of the delivered electricity, calculations and drawing of accounts, so, their speed of work and reliability have key value for business of the company and power supply of consumers. Considering critical importance of these systems, creation of the reliable and powerful data processing center (DPC) for their placement became the uncommon task facing the IT block. For its solution the joint team of specialists "Chelyabenergosbyt" and Borlas company used the advanced approaches both during creation of engineering infrastructure, and at deployment of computing powers. It allowed for problems of data processing and to get operations of applications increase in speed of work from 2 to 11 times depending on transaction.

The DPC located at the central office of the company in Chelyabinsk initially was designed taking into account need to maintain peak loads when closing a settlement period, it provides also the possible growth of amount of data in the future. The design capacity of DPC on a power consumption is 107 kW. The modern engineering systems ensure it smooth operation. So, the conditioning system constructed using the equipment Emerson guarantees the round-the-clock and year-round operation of DPC even at critical loadings. 2 chillers in the rotation mode with the maximum refrigerating capacity of 100.5 kW everyone are for this purpose used. Directly for cooling of the equipment 4 precision conditioners of rack execution are used. The conditioning system has a necessary stock of performance that allows "Chelyabenergosbyt" to increase computing powers if it is required. The supply system is executed using two uninterruptible power supply units of the 120 kVA Chloride 80-NET, it protects DPC in case of electricity feed-in interruptions. Safety of an object is ensured by a monitoring system, a security alarm, video surveillance systems, control and access control. The traditional fire warning is complemented with the system of gas fire extinguishing.

"Stuffing" of DPC also meets the advanced requirements. As a basis of computing infrastructure of DPC the integrated hardware and software systems are used Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. They give advantages on performance and reliability of work because all their components are initially configured and optimized for achievement of the largest speed, and the good results are achieved during the work with databases and applications Oracle.

"In such projects it is especially important to find and propose the best solutions in each case. So, based on testings for DPC the optimized complexes of Oracle which perfectly work together with applications of this supplier were selected and allow to reach outstanding performance. It is important also that the equipment is picked up for many parameters with a stock therefore its opportunities and power can be without effort increased if it is demanded by business development and growth of amount of data", - the vice president of Borlas consulting groupArkady Karev participating in the project notes.

As the Chelyabenergosbyt database server uses Oracle Exadata Database Machine (in the Half Rack configuration). This Exadata configuration contains 4 Oracle DBMS servers and 7 servers of data storage. The special software of Exadata allows to execute directly on servers of storage a set of the transactions which are traditionally working on the DBMS servers. It provides repeated performance improvement for different type of requests and transactions in comparison with normal hardware configurations. According to the testings of Oracle held earlier using data of the average power supplying company in the Oracle Utilities CC&B system on Oracle Exadata Database Machine in a minute 16,500 invoices for payment were issued that hour equals to nearly one million accounts.

As the application server one more representative of the Oracle Engineered System family - Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is used (in the Quarter Rack configuration). The complex is optimized for work with Java as applications of different types. Includes 8 computing nodes containing everyone on two six-nuclear processors and 96 GB of RAM and Storage Appliance ZFS 7320 storage system (40tb disk space). Joint work of the database server and application server, connected by means of network infrastructure of InfifniBand, gave the chance to expand "bottlenecks" and to achieve complex increase in productivity of information systems. Maintenance of migration of databases and applications on the new equipment was also executed jointly Chelyabenergosbyty and specialists of Borlas who already had a similar experience. It allowed to reduce a downtime of an industrial system and quicker to begin operation of the new equipment.

The new data processing center brought performance and reliability of IT infrastructure of Chelyabenergosbyt to new level and that is especially important – accomplishment of the major business processes of the companies was accelerated. Loading of indications of metering devices is accelerated by 6 times, and their processing by 11 times. Time of calculation of consumption and charges was reduced by 2.5 times, and unloading of the corresponding file with receipts became 7.5 times faster. In general similar positive results were received for the different transactions executed by management systems for power data and billing.

"In the work we use powerful software applications. It is natural that they need infrastructure, adequate on scalability and fault tolerance. For these tasks the new DPC was unrolled, - the CEO of "Chelyabenergosbyt" Pavel Kiselyov comments. - As a result we received the IT support conforming to the best international standards that, first of all, means smooth functioning of internal systems and processes of the company, so, electricity delivery reliability, accuracy and timeliness of drawing of accounts for consumers in the Urals".