EDF Energy, one of the UK's largest electricity suppliers,
has used a datawarehouse system to solve the problem of accessing
data from its IBM z900 mainframe.
EDF's problems centred around transferring essential customer data
to and from the mainframe - a five-stage process which resulted in
a congested network whenever files were transferred from the
mainframe storage to an AIX platform. In October last year, EDF
worked with mainframe data access software specialist Corigin to
build an access system.
EDF had a complex IT system as a result of a number of acquisitions
that included SWEB Energy and Seeboard Energy.
Rachel Smith, datawarehouse application manager at EDF Energy,
said, "Our recent acquisitions almost doubled our data requirements
and our infrastructure needed to be able to keep up with our
changing business requirements."
The Corigin system runs on a mid-range server, extracting data from
an HDS storage subsystem into an open Unix-based datawarehouse,
bypassing the mainframe, said Smith. "Corigin then reads the DB2
logs to propagate the datawarehouse with data change," she
said.
"The implementation of Corigin did not require any mainframe coding
development, just configuration changes within the DB2 set-up." The
result has provided significant time and cost savings.
For example, Corigin can transfer selected data into the Oracle
database directly from DB2 in less than two hours, instead of the
previous 10-plus hours, said EDF.
Another benefit is that EDF can update the datawarehouse in near
real-time, quickly reflecting changes in the DB2 database on the
corresponding Oracle database.