Citizen's Gas & Coke Utility
Citizen's Gas & Coke supplies energy to 260,000 residential and business customers in Marion County, Indiana. Like other utilities, Citizen's administers financial, billing and customer service operations as well as the energy side of the business for the management of its two Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) tanks and distribution systems. The information technology department consists of a single data center with 15 systems. Given the nature of the business, the operation is high-volume and requires timeliness and accuracy.
In 1999, as Citizen's was moving from their mainframe to open systems, using Microsoft Windows NT servers, they turned to B&L for its Vertices® tape management solution. "We were familiar with B&L's approach to tape management and their experience with mainframes," said Harold Reed, operations analyst. "Our transition to Vertices was easy. A program was available from B&L to convert our tape management files to Vertices," added Reed.
Citizen's manages about 800 tapes for its servers. In moving to open systems, the Citizen's IT management not only wanted to maintain a high level of security and control for tapes, but they also wanted to add new types of media such as CDs. Reed commented, "We used to microfiche some of our bills and the statements for the credit union, but now we're putting them on CDs and storing them off site. We've been able to integrate them into our overall media management process."
Since Vertices is an enterprise-wide tape management system, Citizen's can access the Vertices database from three areas in the building. The Vertices database itself runs on a production server so that the Vertices records are regularly backed up as part of the normal tape management process.
Operators enter tape management parameters (identification, contents, movement and retention schedules, etc.) when the tape is set up. Vertices generates reports and moves tapes based on predefined parameters of the data set. This enables Citizen's to know where each tape is and allows operators to locate tapes quickly. In addition, the Vertices reports let the administrators know when a tape must move to another location and when tapes are available for reuse. "Vertices generates a report listing what tapes are available for reuse and we send that over to our off-site storage company. The tapes are returned the next day and put back into circulation," continued Reed.
"We really like the fact that Vertices is so easy to use. It only takes us a few minutes a day to keep track of everything. I especially appreciate B&L's customer support. It seems like every time I talk to someone from B&L, I discover something new that Vertices can do," Reed concluded.
