Nashville utility ups data storage to meet smart-grid needs

Nashville Electric Service (NES) has turned to EMC to improve the performance, efficiency and scalability of it s 90-percent virtualized information infrastructure.

EMC’s VNX unified storage replaces the utility’s previous 100 terabytes of NetApp storage.

One of the US’s 12 largest public electric utilities, NES distributes electricity to 360,000 customers in Tennessee.

According to EMC, the new information storage system will provide NES with:

• Scalable data storage capacity that can support the utility’s GIS mapping applications and coming smart-grid infrastructure.
• Backups that take one hour instead of four.
• Improved performance of test and development environments, as well as production systems.

With the new system, NES is seeing “65 percent to 80 percent faster production system backups and equal improvements to our end-users response times,” said Vic Hatridge, the company’s vice president and CIO.

“We add about 10 terabytes of data every twelve months,” added Ricky Davis, infrastructure manager with CIBER Inc. at NES. “Before we were worried about having to put a lot of new projects on hold due to overwhelming storage demand.”