Enersource

Keeping Current

Maxium Solutions (now Skipton Group) plugs in an IBM® solution that delivers power and reliability for local utility Enersource.

How does a utility company offer the reliability that customers demand at a reasonable cost? For Enersource Corporation of Mississauga, Ontario, it starts with technology – maintaining current, reliable systems that keep internal costs down.

With more than 85 years in business, Enersource has increasingly depended on technology to become the diversified family of energy, technology and telecommunications companies it is today. Among the Enersource group of companies with a particular need for reliability are Mississauga Hydro, which provides electricity to over 170,000 residential and business customers, and Enersource Telecom, which provides high speed Internet and fibre optic network connectivity.

"Business growth has been significant," says Wally Curry, Vice President, Information Systems & Support Services. "Our IT center has gradually grown to about 30 stand alone servers of different flavors and vintages. Providing backup was becoming unmanageable and cost prohibitive, and when we introduced J.D. Edwards OneWorld to handle critical Enterprise Resource Planning applications, we started to have problems with the workload on our existing hardware."

Enersource turned to IBM Premier Business Partner Maxium Solutions Inc. for assistance. Maxium recommended a solution consisting of an IBM BladeCenter™ integrating eight IBM xSeries® servers, and an IBM Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure.

The result is a scalable, fully redundant server and storage environment with ample power to spare for growing business needs.

"The IBM solution provides everything we were looking for – consolidation, manageability, reliability and redundancy. Everything works as advertised, doing what we expected and more."

– Wally Curry, Vice President, Information Systems & Support Services, Enersource Corporation - Read More