Compañia Nacional de Fuerza y Luz S.A. Consolidates Applications and Reduces Data Center’s Space and Electricity Consumption
 
 

Compañia Nacional de Fuerza y Luz S.A. Consolidates Applications and Reduces Data Center’s Space and Electricity Consumption

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Compañía Nacional de Fuerza y Luz S.A. (CNFL) is Costa Rica’s largest distributor of electricity. Its system consists of 35 substations and 3,600 miles of power lines with a distribution network covering 350 square miles of the San Jose metropolitan area. CNFL serves 600,000 customers, a 46% share of the Costa Rican electricity market. IT has a service area that covers 1.8% of the country.

The company consolidated its business applications on 14 Sun Blade 6000 servers from Oracle and reduced the space used in its data center to one rack. The company also reduced electricity consumption due to the reduced power and cooling requirements of its servers. CNFL achieved optimal storage of unstructured data with Oracle's StorageTek SL48 tape library, complying with applicable Costa Rican laws and lowering its costs, all while making its information highly available

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Compañía Nacional de Fuerza y Luz S.A.

  • “Our company’s business is generating and marketing clean energy— hydroelectric and wind power. We’ve centralized multiple applications onto fewer servers, using Sun servers from Oracle, and lowered energy use, modeling for our customers how to manage electricity consumption.” - José Ramón Molina Garita, Infrastructure Engineer, Compañía Nacional de Fuerza y Luz S.A.

  • Lower data center costs and improve the IT infrastructure performance for optimal operations by consolidating servers and minimizing space usage
  • Lower electricity consumption and reduce the amount of cooling needed for the data center
  • Increase storage capacity, accelerate data recovery time, and manage unstructured information, such as videos, photos, and e-mails, to comply with government regulations for public services companies
  • Become a model for its customers in energy use, continuing with its clean and sustainable energy strategy
  • Comply with regulations relating to the environment, including workplace health and safety

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Extended space for the data center, which had exhausted its capacity, by installing Oracle’s Sun Blade 6000 servers, reducing space used from 258 square feet to one 19-inch rack
  • Consolidated applications that had been distributed among 100 standalone servers into 14 blade servers, housed in two enclosures, reducing electricity consumption and the size of the data center’s cooling system due to the blade servers’ lower power requirements
  • Reduced the number of cables connecting servers to power sources from 70 to just 6, simplifying data center management
  • Achieved high server availability, even when faced by events, such as power failures, enabling the company to reboot systems without hardware or software problems
  • Deployed Oracle's StorageTek SL48 tape library to store information, increasing backup capacity and accelerating backup time for unstructured information, such as e-mails, videos, and photos of the company’s electric installations, reducing backup time from at least 48 hours to 4 hours and reducing paper usage by digitizing documents and storing them online
  • Complied with legal requirements for information backup on magnetic media, ensuring high availability and a lower total cost of ownership
  • Served as an energy conservation model for the company’s clients by centralizing servers and reducing energy use
  • Completed the implementation on time, working with Oracle Partner Grupo CESA, Control Electrónico S.A.

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