The Case Study of AIL

ABOUT AIL

AIL (Aziende Industriali di Lugano) SA is the main distributor of electricity, water and gas in the Canton of Ticino. Their history began in 1972 when it was decided to bring together under one management two municipal companies that had been operating separately for more than 100 years: the OECL (Officina elettrica comunale di Lugano) and the Azienda comunale dell’Acqua e Gas. In 2000, the AIL became a Joint Stock Company in which the City of Lugano holds the entire share capital. The company, in addition to producing and distributing drinking and industrial water, electricity and gas, builds and operates the electric and hydraulic networks necessary to transport its products from the point of delivery or purchase to the more than 100 thousand customers in the Sottoceneri region. Products are also sold wholesale to other companies that handle distribution in their respective areas. AIL SA employs about 330 people with a turnover of more than 310 million francs.

THE CHALLENGE

The evolution of the company in recent years, with a growing number of customers, investment in specialized personnel and advanced technologies for the production and delivery of products and services, and the expansion of networks for the transportation of energy, water and gas, has required more advanced and efficient tools to ensure constant and reliable control of the entire distribution infrastructure and to speed up and ensure the collection, management, processing and storage of the large amount of data coming into the headquarters.

A crucial role in this evolution has been played by IT systems, which have become even more of a determining element in delivering better products and services to customers and increasing AILs’ leading position in the Canton Ticino market.

“IT systems are the pivot around which the entire business of the AILs revolves,” points out Michele Rusconi, head of the IT dispensing and support office. The unavailability of systems or applications even for a short time is likely to create serious problems for our customers, with possible negative consequences on the perception of service quality and actual business. Therefore, IT efficiency is the object of special attention throughout the company, and it is essential to adapt it to business needs and objectives. This is the reason that recently prompted us to review our entire information and data management infrastructure, making it more efficient and secure.”

AIL SA information systems are based on two data centers about 9 km apart and connected by proprietary fiber that ensures high speed and complete redundancy

CRITICAL ISSUES AND EVOLUTION OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS

The previous IT infrastructure, which had been in place for 5 years, was no longer suitable to support the needs of the company: due to obvious critical performance issues, poor service continuity guarantees, and the length and complexity of disaster recovery procedures for critical applications such as SAP.

As a result, the company decided to embark on a renovation path by replacing the systems in the two data centers with others meeting requirements for greater efficiency and performance, data and application security. Specifically:

• To have two mirrored data centers with automatic and efficient workload distribution by arriving at an excellent ROI from the investment made.
• Ability of each data center to absorb, as needed and in real time, the entire workload without causing disruption to users and with minimal performance degradation. That is, goals of Hight Availability and Zero downtime.
• Implement a solution that would simplify previously time-consuming and complex disaster recovery procedures with guaranteed immediate recoveries for critical applications such as SAP.

Having established the selection criteria, the company turned to 4IT Solutions, the trusted partner that has been with it on major ICT issues for many years, to select the systems and design the new infrastructure.

AIL RENOVATES IT WITH EMC VNX AND Vplex SOLUTIONS.

In each data center, in a VMware environment (except for SAP still residing on physical servers), a VNX system with SAS disks and Fast Cache has been included to improve performance especially for “data intensive” applications, such as SAP.

Installing VPLEX Metro in both data centers created storage federation between the VNX systems and an active/active operating mode, increasing the efficiency and operational simplicity and flexibility of the entire information infrastructure. VPLEX enables, for example, the simple, fast, and completely transparent movement of virtual machines, thus achieving better workload balancing on server and storage resources and eliminating the need to stop applications and users in case of maintenance or system upgrades (an issue quite evident with the previous infrastructure).

Through VPLEX all data are written synchronously to both VNXs maintaining a mirror image between the two systems at all times, guaranteeing almost immediate recovery.

Migration from the previous infrastructure to the new EMC was rapid, taking only a few days to complete all phases of installation, data migration, and testing, until fully operational. All activities carried out with insignificant impact on users.

BENEFITS

The implementation of the VNX-VPLEX infrastructure proved to be the correct choice for AILs’ objectives. The benefits were immediate and tangible:

• Flexibility and high performance. Performance and throughput at the storage level are not comparable with the previous infrastructure, resulting in improved service levels for users. The VNX and VPLEX architecture in a VMware environment enables simple and flexible management of resources in the two data centers with quick configuration and maintenance actions without impacting operations.

Real active/active solution. An operational mode that achieved workload balancing and automatic mobility of applications and data between the two data centers; high levels of hight availability; and assured business continuity under any condition or contingency.

• Simplicity of storage infrastructure management. With the help of Unisphere, EMC’s storage management platform, the unified management of VNX and VPLEX systems is now significantly simplified with the support of an intuitive GUI-driven user interface that does not require specialized technical personnel. A significant improvement for AIL over the complexity of the previous infrastructure.

Efficient, simple and fast disaster recovery procedure for SAP. For AILs, it was one of the most critical elements because of the importance of SAP to the company’s business and the inadequacy of the previous procedure: long and complex steps, pages of lines of code to guide the process, the need for properly trained staff to perform the various steps, and difficulty in keeping it up-to-date and tested. The VNX and VPLEX architecture has greatly simplified the disaster recovery process for SAP: few steps and fast, risk-free execution of the process, also facilitated by the availability of the VPLEX graphical user interface (GUI).

The planned migration of SAP to VMware virtual machines, will further enhance ease of management.

• Zero downtime. With the combination of VNX and VPLEX, “no single point of failure” and “zero RTO” conditions were achieved, ensuring business continuity for SAP and other critical business applications.

Easy and transparent maintenance and upgrades. Any maintenance work or upgrades on the systems in both data centers can be scheduled and performed without causing any disruption to users