An accumulation of systems
As the name suggests, the IT Center is responsible for all information technology requirements for Southern Electric, primarily work involved with customer billing systems and support of the engineering systems which handle power distribution. And not unlike many other large organizations, Southern Electric has acquired a multiplicity of computing power over the years and currently has ICL. DEC, IBM and UNIX systems all performing different functions.

A specialist partnership
The relationship between Metron and Southern Electric has been a long and mutually successful one, spanning nearly eight years. Traditionally, all the customer billing systems were resident on an ICL 3980. When Leith Crunden joined Southern Electric in the mid 80s, his first task was to set up a Capacity Planning team which would handle all the planning and forecasting for the company’s systems which play a crucial role in the operation and management of the business.
He commented: "In choosing Metron’s Athene product in 1987 as our first performance management tool, I would admit to taking something of a gamble. The product was new and so was the company, but in comparison, other offerings on the market were beginning to look their age. Fortunately, the gamble paid off and has been regarded by all concerned as an excellent decision ever since."

Measuring success
In fact, the first exercise carried out using Athene saved Southern Electric about £300,000. Athene was used to determine the most cost-effective disk I/O subsystem strategy for the ICL mainframes. An initial document had proposed the installation of additional disk storage and controllers at a total cost of £1.25m. Athene/VME was used to model alternative configurations and based on the resultant performance predictions, a revised hardware solution was recommended at a cost of under £1m.

The power distribution side of Southern Electric’s business is run on a number of DEC VAX machines and for these, Mr Crunden’s team has used Athene/VMS. Leith Crunden commented: "Using Metron’s products we have modeled at least fifteen different hardware upgrades, moved around the workloads and managed to rationalize the existing machines without any further hardware expenditure."

The IBM version of Athene for MVS systems was installed for Southern Electric in the spring of this year to test the comprehensive new customer system which will be ready in 1997. Trials will begin shortly using this version of Metron's product.

Mapping the future
Southern Electric is undertaking a major two year programme to redevelop the engineering systems. Part of this project is a UNIX-based Geographic 4 Information System, which will transfer all the existing hand-drawn maps of overhead and underground electricity networks into a computerized format, right down to connections to individual houses. The system will thus provide engineers with detailed plans of the region and enable them to identify and assess faults or problems with much greater accuracy, speed and confidence.

In order to size the requisite DEC Alpha model for the GIS application, which will need to be able to support some fifty workstations, a test system was installed. This runs on a small 3400 Alpha computer, using one workstation as the server and supporting seven additional workstations.
The Capacity Planning or sizing was initially undertaken using pen and paper taking data from the test system and then scaling this up to the full-size system. Athene/Unix from Metron was then used to confirm these findings and fine tune the analysis.

According to Leith Crunden: "This was our first experience of Athene/Unix and it confirmed that the size of machine identified by the paper-based calculations was correct.

The system is now up and running, although it will be another year before all the geographic data has been loaded. Based on the success of this initial project for Athene/Unix, Southern Electric is now planning to use the software extensively over the course of the next five or six months for the next stage of the new engineering system.