Industry Background

With the continuous advancement of technology, the electric power industry is inevitably increasing its reliance on technology and its needs for good IT management. The power industry, commonly divided into different degrees of specialization includes: power automation, power technology, power market, power retailing and general IT applications.

The electric power automation is primarily software based and uses automated equipments; whilst power technology constructs the main data network using software and automated equipments. Power retailing and general IT applications are largely software based.

IT Requirements Analysis

The inability to incorporate network management into the power industry has resulted in various negative impacts. From the users’ perspective, fault handling procedures are time consuming and the high faults occurrences have resulted in much customer dissatisfaction. Looking from the systems development viewpoint, information on equipments and operation processes are often inaccurate. The lack of system knowledge also results in incorrect judgments made by maintenance staffs, thereby affecting the health of server systems.

From the internal operations perspective, obsolete management methods inevitably results in increased maintenance workload and lower maintenance level. These affects the power company’s service quality and operational costs.

Therefore, in view of the existing network and business operations problems, it is necessary to build an extensive IT infrastructure covering servers, networks and other important IT devices and an up-to-date IT management system that is able to maintain service quality timely.

Technology Challenges

Vertical and horizontal management — The power industry management system lacks the platform for integrating both vertical and horizontal management. The information power network of today involves multi-vendors products such as Cisco, Fundry and other manufacturers. Most vendors have their own network management products, but are limited to network element level management that has little versatility. It also lacks real-time network condition analysis, diagnostic tools and summary reports.

Construction and management — With the increasing use of technology in the power industry, the need for network expansion and higher service quality also increase. The new application devices that service providers are coming up with also adds complexity to the highly intricate and heterogeneous IT infrastructure. This puts a strain on the original construction networks, where they are now required to be more adaptable and scalable.

Intensive management — The vast power management system requires an equally huge platform to support it. This includes diverse range of application servers, operation systems and support systems such as Web server, Domino, SQL etc. Operating systems like Window, Linux and UNIX are also installed according to the varied needs of managers. There is a need to simplify maintenance by providing a reliable and intuitive view of business devices and topology view of actual circumstances.

Overall trans-regional monitoring — Spanning across large geographic area is one unique characteristics of the power industry. In such a complex and heterogeneous IT environment, simple monitoring cannot reflect the actual operation situation or potential bottlenecks.?It is thus necessary to have a wholesome power network management system that has its priority on business services.

Solutions

Comprehensive IT management
With the current decentralized operational system, NetGain Enterprise Manager™ acts as the data centre that collates information, monitors system, provides forewarns and reports status through a configured unified management interface for the various multi-vendor network equipments. The IT infrastructure of the power industry consists of computers and servers provided by companies such as HP, IBM and SUN, as well as a mainframe system supported by Lotus Notes, ORACLE, SYBASE, WEB Services, DNS, DHCP, FTP and Email services. These information systems are integrated into a unified management network that enhances production, automation and organization.

Management from the business perspective
NetGain Enterprise Manager™ provides a complete display of operational systems from the overall view to the individual IT links status; in particular the business logic dependent relationships between applications and devices. It classifies all IT platform reliant operations into the following 13 systems: OA system, ORACLE, the Internet, power supply reliability management system, backup system, Web system, energy system, power transmission management system, project management system, transmission reliability management system, cadre management system, distribution management system and anti-virus system. With these, all projects are also monitored through an overall business view, with a pre-emptive monitoring function that is able to locate faults effectively.

Plug-and-play hardware with automatic configuration
Network devices, servers and other power system devices undergo an automatic scanning diagnosis and configuration of monitoring objects. These automatic discovery and configuration functions help to reduce the hassle of manual configuration.

Intelligent central alarm management
The central alarm system, complying with telecommunication standards, has the unique ability of classifying faults and streamlining repeated alarms. It has a built-in alarm filtering and mapping mechanism that is able to perform event-related analysis, targeting accurately at the system problems.

Case Studies

Our products have been successfully designed to cater to the unique systems of the power industry. The following diagram shows the deployment flowchart of NetGain EM.

Conclusion

Due to the unique structure of the power industry, having comprehensive network infrastructure and secured application are essential. It is necessary to integrate and monitor the various multi-vendor devices, so as to provide a secure and well-protected core operational system. The capacity to unify management and monitoring system is also crucial factor in determining success. NetGain Systems’ solution integrates both vertical and horizontal management, allowing users to manage their power IT infrastructure from a business perspective.