Hewlett-Packard Case Study Sample

British Energy Builds a Highly Reliable and Scalable Trading Infrastructure, and Reduces Costs with HP PolyServe Software for Microsoft SQL Server

British Energy is the United Kingdom's largest producer of electricity and the lowest carbon emitter of the major UK electricity generators. The company's British Energy Power & Energy Trading division trades all of British Energy's electricity output in the marketplace, placing 70 terawatts of power into the market annually. Placing electricity into the power grid is an extremely complex process, and requires that the amount of power British Energy sells into the grid precisely matches British Energy's output.

In order to better meet the needs of its trading division, British Energy decided to re-engineer the way in which it trades electricity, including all of its business processes and underlying IT infrastructure. It was using a legacy system which was inflexible, difficult to scale, and did not provide the agility the company needed in order to successfully trade power in a rapidly changing marketplace. British Energy was looking for a solution that would allow it to move to a Microsoft-based set of technologies, reduce Microsoft SQL Server costs through consolidation, improve flexibility and agility, and offer a high-availability environment.

The company deployed a comprehensive HP solution, including HP PolyServe Software for Microsoft SQL Server, HP ProLiant DL585 G2 Servers, and HP Storage-Works Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVAs) for the new infrastructure. The HP ProLiant DL585 G2 Servers run a variety of applications, including Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise 64bit SP1. The EVAs host both production and non-production data, as well as Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise 64bit SP1 and its databases. British Energy uses HP StorageWorks Continuous Access EVA software to provide synchronous data replication between the EVAs.....