Visayan Electric Company (VECO)

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VECO builds up its mission-critical systems using Fujitsu teamservers

The Fujitsu teamservers have become the heart of Visayan Electric Company's (VECO) business ever since the servers were installed at their Cebu headquarters in December 1999. VECO is the second largest electric company in the country servicing Cebu and other major cities in the province.

As VECO's billing and other mission-critical applications are being run on two quad processor Fujitsu teamservers L880 in a cluster configuration, the servers became an important facility to the company's overall objectives and strategies.

Felipe "Joboy" F. Esmas, Jr., EDP Assistant Chief, says that originally, VECO's billing system was developed using RPG running on an IBM System 38 machine. Fujitsu then converted the entire application to COBOL and ran it on the Fujitsu K670/20 almost a decade ago. Last year, a development effort was undertaken by VECO to develop the same application in Oracle to run in the new Fujitsu teamservers. Prior to the installation of the newer L880 model, VECO had a much smaller C530I version.

"The main requirement was to migrate from the old non-Y2K compliant Fujitsu K670system to the new Intel-based Fujitsu teamservers running Oracle on Windows NT," he points out. "VECO's in-house programmers developed their own billing system from scratch. Fujitsu provided us the Oracle database." As a show of support, Fujitsu provided VECO a loaner machine to use for the development of their application.

Fujitsu teamserver L880 handle the following mission critical applications:

• Billing System
• Customer Assistance and Information System (CAIS)
• Inventory
• Payroll
• Stock and Transfer

The Fujitsu teamserver L800i series comprises enterprise servers for mission-critical business applications. The L880i features multiple 500MHz Pentium®III Xeon™ processors with 512KB/1MB Level 2 cache and 100 MHz system bus for optimum end-to-end performance and reliability. They are upgradable to 4-way operation and target the consolidated LAN server market as well as larger high-performance enterprise applications.

"The L880i model continues Fujitsu's tradition of providing its customers with the best in resilient and reliable server solutions matched to the latest Intel technology," claims Felipe R. Manalang, EVP and GM at FPI. "Once again, our customers do not have to wait long to obtain highly reliable and practical implementations of Intel technology for all their computing tasks."

"The ultimate challenge concerning the installation of the Fujitsu teamservers is for the system to offer maximum up-time," adds Esmas. "Processing power is also a big challenge. Since NT is VECO's choice of operating system, Fujitsu then decided to offer Oracle Failsafe on Microsoft Cluster Servers (MSCS), the first installation of its kind in the country."

According to Esmas, VECO is planning to upgrade the company's Banilad substation server as offsite back-up server for the Fujitsu teamservers to ensure continuous business operation despite disasters.

Exceptional Support

"Our relationship with FPI is very good, in fact, exceptional," Esmas stresses. Currently, FPI is providing VECO's Fujitsu teamserver MSCS cluster with a 24 x 7 comprehensive maintenance support through FPI's Cebu Business Office.

"We expect the same continuously fast response to our problems and concerns. In the event of a breakdown, we expect availability of parts from FPI's Cebu Business Office," he says. "Previous satisfactory relationship, competitive price, and reliability - these were the three major decision factors that made us decide to go for the Fujitsu teamserver system."

Manalang adds, "All Fujitsu teamservers offer industry-standard features and high-performance capacities ideal for LAN server, Web server, departmental, or business applications such as those implemented at VECO. As always, Fujitsu teamserver delivers reliability, first class total cost of ownership, and top-of-the-range processing power to meet the requirements of our valued customers."

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