TransAlta

Power Generator Streamlines IT, Improves Service with Integrated Management Solution

Based in Calgary, Canada, TransAlta is an international power generator and wholesale marketer of electricity. The company had relied on an outsourcer for its help desk and service management solution, which supported 48 facilities across Canada, the United States, and Australia. The outsourced solution was limiting the IT department’s view into data center operations and slowed resolution of server and network issues. For better insight into its distributed infrastructure, TransAlta deployed an end-to-end service management solution based on Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007 and EMC Smarts. Now, the IT department resolves issues faster, is implementing service-level management, and is laying a solid foundation for deploying new business applications. These enhanced management capabilities enable TransAlta to deliver power more efficiently and with less environmental impact.

 

Situation

TransAlta is a power generation and energy marketing company. The company operates 48 power-producing facilities in Canada, the United States, and Australia, with an overall capacity of more than 8,000 megawatts. The company’s marketing arm secures long-term contracts for the power it produces. Based in Calgary, Canada, TransAlta employs 2,200 people.

With our outsourced solution, we weren’t getting the information we required to successfully support the business of TransAlta. Kent Farries Manager, Infrastructure Architecture, TransAlta

With homes, businesses, and public services dependent on the energy that is generated by TransAlta, operating an efficient IT infrastructure to support its business systems is critical. TransAlta outsourced the monitoring and management of its IT infrastructure, which included a help-desk component, to a third party that relied on HP OpenView Service Desk. Kent Farries, Manager, Infrastructure Architecture at TransAlta, says, “With our outsourced solution, we weren’t getting the information we required to successfully support the business of TransAlta.” The IT department wanted to maintain high availability of its business systems and provide customer service level agreements (SLAs), but without detailed insight into system performance, the department was unable to set service-level expectations.

From an operational perspective, the outsourced solution presented further difficulties. The TransAlta IT department shared management responsibilities with the outsourcer, but TransAlta did not have a view into the monitoring system, which resided at the outsourcer’s data center.

Oliver Sin, IT Specialist at TransAlta, recalls, “Our remote, Citrix-based connection to the system was very slow and even unavailable at times. We didn’t have control over the connection to the monitoring system—the whole thing was out of our hands.”

IT productivity suffered because of this. “Time to resolution was a problem,” says Farries. “We couldn’t properly address application performance issues because we didn’t have the visibility into the servers that we needed. Also, we’d get an overload of reports if a link went down between us and the outsourcer. And sometimes, we couldn’t even log onto the help-desk portion of the system due to poor performance.”

TransAlta also found its productivity hindered because OpenView Operations Agent didn’t allow the TransAlta IT department to monitor key systems, including its own Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 data management software, its Active Directory® service domains, or its Internet Information Services (IIS 6.0). “We had no insights into our SQL Server, IIS, or Active Directory environments. We weren’t aware of issues we should have been aware of,” Sin reports. “After deploying a new server,” Farries adds, “It could take up to a week before we were actually getting results back from our outsourced solution that we could look at and analyze. Because we had no day-to-day visibility, we relied solely on our outsourcer to keep us informed about infrastructure issues that could ultimately affect the business.”

In addition to the need for better tools for monitoring its business applications and services, TransAlta needed better insight into the network components of its IT infrastructure. “We needed a system that would provide the logic for root-cause analysis so that we could see and isolate network issues that were affecting services,” says Farries. TransAlta wanted an integrated monitoring system, that would provide all of these capabilities—application, service, and network monitoring—from within the same management environment.

TransAlta was also planning to transition from an IBM-based e-mail and collaboration solution to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. In light of this, the IT department wanted to lay the groundwork for successfully managing these new business applications. “Our goal was to become more aligned with the business of TransAlta,” says Farries. “But we couldn’t achieve this with the toolset we were using. It didn’t give us the immediate feedback we needed, it didn’t include all of the components of our environment, and, we had to rely solely on our outsourcer to keep us informed about issues that could ultimately affect the business.”

Solution

TransAlta briefly considered bringing its OpenView Service Desk solution in-house for better management control, but the OpenView solution lacked the ability to manage the company’s increasingly Microsoft-based technology infrastructure. “We wanted to gain visibility into our SQL Server, IIS, and Active Directory environments, and also be fully prepared to manage our Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 environments once they are deployed,” notes Farries. TransAlta turned to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 “because it gave us visibility into systems that we didn’t have before, and also into new systems we are planning to deploy. System Center Operations Manager 2007 was the clear choice,” states Sin.

EMC Smarts provides a unique capability to help us understand the root-cause of incidents in our Infrastructure. Mike Moore Enterprise Technical Architect,     TransAlta

TransAlta also wanted a service management solution that was network-aware and capable of identifying the root cause of network problems. The company found this capability in a joint offering from EMC and Microsoft, which combines the advanced network monitoring capabilities of EMC Smarts with the ease of use and IT service management capabilities of System Center Operations Manager 2007. EMC is a global provider of integrated hardware, software, and services, and a longtime strategic IT partner of TransAlta. Mike Moore, Enterprise Technical Architect at TransAlta says, “Through its codebook technology, EMC Smarts provides a unique capability to help us understand the root-cause of incidents in our Infrastructure.”

TransAlta took further advantage of the integration capabilities of System Center Operations Manager 2007 by tying in a third-party help-desk solution, BMC Remedy Service Desk. “We wanted a single point of focus for our BMC Remedy solution, so we could create incidents and funnel them to the proper operations groups,” says Sin.

TransAlta uses an adapter for System Center Operations Manager 2007 to connect it to EMC Smarts. System Center Operations works together with the EMC Smarts root-cause analysis engine to pinpoint network problems by only sending root-cause problems to EMC Smarts. EMC Smarts performs event correlation to determine the cause of the problem, and then, through another adapter, feeds alerts to BMC Remedy Service Desk, which performs a lookup within the BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database to retrieve the necessary information for dispatching and alerting the appropriate support staff.

In addition to the integrated environment that System Center Operations Manager 2007 enabled TransAlta to create, the company chose the solution because of the Microsoft and third-party management packs it offers for extending management capabilities to operating systems, applications, and other technology components. System Center Operations Manager 2007 Management Packs contain best practices for discovering, monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting on specific technology components.

Using System Center, TransAlta currently manages nearly 250 production servers running the Windows Server® 2003  operating system. The IT department plans to manage approximately 200 additional test and development servers within System Center Operations Manager 2007 in the upcoming year. “When everything was with our outsourcer, it was cost-prohibitive to monitor our test and development environment,” says Farries. “Now that we have brought our monitoring in-house, we can better afford to gain visibility into all of our servers.” And although TransAlta has brought its monitoring tools in-house, it still shares management responsibilities with its outsourcer. “Now, we work as one team. We both get to see the issues immediately, and we combine forces to fix them.”

Benefits

With System Center Operations Manager 2007 and EMC Smarts, TransAlta has built a fully integrated service management and help-desk solution. The solution gives the IT department greater control over its IT services. With better visibility into key business systems and more precise reporting, the IT staff is able to provide systems that help TransAlta generate power more efficiently. Enhanced integration capabilities also help TransAlta easily extend the solution as new business applications are deployed.

Better Service Availability

With its previous system, TransAlta did not have insight into critical business applications such as its SQL Server database software, IIS, or Active Directory domains. “Take something like Active

With System Center Operations Manager 2007, we are catching configuration problems with the Windows Server operating system that we wouldn’t have caught before. Mike Moore Enterprise Technical Architect      TransAlta

Directory replication,” explains Sin. “With OpenView, we weren’t aware of Active Directory issues at all. When we deployed our new system, we were getting quite a few alerts regarding Active Directory, which helped us to identify a Domain Name System (DNS) problem with our child domain. Replication was failing because it didn’t know where to go. Without System Center Operations Manager 2007, we wouldn’t have known about this Active Directory issue at all. But instead, our Wintel Operations group was able to proactively fix the replication problem before it affected daily operations.” Moore adds, “With System Center Operations Manager 2007, we are catching configuration problems with the Windows Server® operating system that we wouldn’t have caught before.” 

Integration with EMC Smarts also gives the TransAlta IT department deeper views into network appliances like switches and routers, which it didn’t have previously. “We are much more aware of these network elements and the relationships between them,” says Farries. “And the relationships are a big thing,” adds Sin. “Now, we can easily see what is connected to what, down to the port level. Before EMC Smarts, we sometimes had to spend hours tracing cables beneath the floor to find a faulty connection. Now, we get an alarm that tells us which port is down, and we can see exactly where it was plugged into on the switch and on the device. We also now have the ability to monitor fans, power supplies, and more—so that we can receive warnings when something is about to fail, and schedule outages at non-critical hours to replace the failing component.”

Higher Energy Efficiency

The new monitoring system helps TransAlta ensure that the systems used for power plant optimization decisions are available and performing well. Moore says, “There are many IT-managed systems used by our Generation staff to make decisions on how to generate power in the most efficient means possible.  System Center Operations Manager 2007 and EMC Smarts bring about new efficiencies that result in better profitability for TransAlta, and more environmentally-sound power generation.”

Sin adds, “We are undertaking another project that will use System Center Operations Manager 2007 and EMC Smarts to provide direct insight into power plant operations. Ultimately, better system reliability will result in our ability to provide the diagnostics center with better data to help optimize plant operation.”

Enhanced Integration

Farries recalls, “It used to take days to get a report from our outsourced solution. And by the time we got the report, we had already missed the event. With System Center Operations Manager 2007 our staff is able to view performance statistics and use other tools to get visibility right away.” Because it interoperates with third-party systems, “we’ve been able to use System Center Operations Manager 2007 to build a full solution rather than a partial one, as we had in the past. System Center Operations Manager 2007 ties into EMC Smarts, which ties in to BMC Remedy Service Desk and our Atrium database, and now, people are getting paged immediately if there is an issue.”

Not only are IT staff members at TransAlta getting paged immediately, they receive pages about the right issues.

“The integration of System Center Operations Manager 2007 with the EMC Smarts root-cause analysis engine means that our staff isn’t awakened at 3 a.m. by a page about a server issue when it’s actually a router that’s down,” says Farries.

“This lets our operation staff do remediation work on the servers at the proper time—rather than in the middle of the night. Some of our monitored systems aren’t available full-time, so we don’t want to wake staff in the middle of the night unnecessarily,” explains Moore. “Furthermore, the ability to alert the appropriate Operations personnel has significantly reduced the number of false positives being addressed in our organization.”

It used to take days to get a report from our outsourced solution. With System Center Operations Manager 2007 our staff is able to view performance statistics and use other tools to get visibility right away. Kent Farries Manager Infrastructure Architecture, TransAlta

TransAlta also benefits from the Management Packs feature of System Center Operations Manager 2007, which make it much easier to extend the company’s solution to other operating systems, applications, and technology components. “System Center Operations Manager 2007 helps us create a more open monitoring environment, where we can easily plug into other systems. In the future, we may tie into UNIX-or AIX-based systems, and the management packs will help us do this.” Microsoft also provides tools that enable TransAlta developers to develop or customize management packs for System Center Operations Manager 2007. “We’re looking at creating our own management pack for one of our critical, in-house–developed applications,” says Sin. “Our developers are very Windows®-oriented, and they can just run with these management packs and integrate their toolsets into the new environment.”

Faster Time to Resolution

One of the reasons that System Center Operations Manager 2007 helps TransAlta resolve infrastructure issue more quickly is its familiar, easy-to-use Windows-based interface. “Our administrators can just jump right in and know where to go. The Windows interface feels natural. Microsoft has done away with a lot of the complexity to make a monitoring system that is very approachable and helps administrators focus on what they need to know.”

System Center Operations Manager 2007 also helps administrators resolve problems more quickly by directing them to potential solutions and Microsoft Knowledge Base articles to speed troubleshooting. “Before, we had to look for solutions ourselves,” says Sin. “System Center Operations Manager 2007 offers us solutions to try out right then and there. It may seem like a small thing, but it can save lots of time on every issue.”

System Center Operations Manager 2007 also helps TransAlta increase IT efficiency by minimizing false alarms. Through self-tuning capabilities, the system ‘learns’ and adjusts alerting behavior in relation to normal business usage patterns of applications and systems. “We’ve reduced our overall number of tickets since we started using System Center Operations Manager 2007,” says Sin. “We’re getting higher-quality information and eliminating a lot of the junk.”

Ability to Anticipate Business Needs

“System Center Operations Manager 2007 and EMC Smarts are going to help us proactively catch issues developing in our environment before they affect the user,” says Farries. With enhanced, end-to-end reporting capabilities, the IT department can more successfully monitor system and network health to prevent service interruptions to the company’s IT systems and improve uptime for essential services. “It could be something as simple as making more disk space available so that all of a sudden we don’t have 500 users who can’t save a file. With better visibility through detailed reports, we can now anticipate issues like this before they happen. System Center Operations Manager 2007 integration with EMC Smarts helps us keep business services available, prevent interruptions, and increase uptime.”

With its new service management environment, TransAlta is laying the foundation for the deployment of future business applications such as Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007. It also allows the IT department to create SLAs with the business units. “System Center Operations Manager 2007 and EMC Smarts gives us full visibility, so we can now sit down with the business units and talk real SLAs—and then meet those service expectations,” says Farries. “From an architecture perspective, System Center Operations Manager 2007 helps us establish design guidelines because it gives us all the information we need about our existing infrastructure and the uptime we are currently achieving. And the EMC Smarts integration gives us the network visibility we need to achieve end-to-end service management. Without these tools, we would never be able to have these service levels conversations with the business.”

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