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Paragon Powers Largest U.S. Provider of Nuclear Energy
Headquartered in Downer's Grove, Illinois, Exelon
Nuclear operates the largest nuclear fleet in the nation
and the third largest fleet in the world. Exelon's 10
stations—
with a total of 17 reactors—
represents
approximately 20 percent of the U.S. nuclear industry's
power capacity. The Exelon Nuclear Mid-Atlantic
Regional Operating Group (ROG), located in Kennett
Square, Pennsylvania, provides governance, oversight,
and support to four nuclear generating stations, which
house six operating nuclear reactors located in
Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
According to Doug McGinnis, Manager, Infrastructure
Services for Exelon, the energy industry has morphed
into a more competitive marketplace where creative cost
cutting has become a necessity. Exelon Nuclear's
management team turned to McGinnis and his IT team to leverage the latest technologies to increase savings for
the rest of the company. "With the proliferation of server-hosted applications, there has been an increased
reliance on the network infrastructure, especially for storing more data and keeping records secure. We are
storing more data than ever before, especially millions of paper drawings, making information security a big piece
of the puzzle," said McGinnis. "It is imperative for us to keep users to a minimum in terms of server access."
With this expanded reliance on Exelon's network infrastructure, McGinnis' IT environment required the
deployment of more servers. To control these servers, McGinnis initially opted for off the shelf KVM products.
However, these KVM products proved to be unreliable and incompatible with the various hardware platforms in
the data center. He also needed remote access to the network, and his current solutions were lacking in that
department as well.
The Solution
McGinnis selected Raritan's award winning Paragon®
with Cat5 SimplicityTM and the IP-ReachTM TR-Series
remote access option. "We reviewed all the options and
determined that Raritan was one of the few vendors who
could provide a complete solution that could handle the
ubiquitous nature of our data center and its disparate
technologies," he said. "Plus, having remote access to
the console provided the flexibility and security to work
on our boxes using an out-of-band connection for BIOS
level control."
Since September 2002, Paragon has been "powering"
Exelon's data center in Kennett Square that consists of
23 servers—
20 Wintel servers, two UNIX servers and
one Sun server. "We looked at Avocent, and Rose
[Electronics], but Raritan was the most cost-effective for
a data center of our size," said McGinnis.
McGinnis has experienced no performance issues and is
quite happy with the Raritan solution. "We love the
security levels offered by Paragon and IP-Reach,
especially the 128-bit SSL encryption and RADIUSenabled
authentication. With the Raritan solutions, we
can configure group management and different levels of
administration beyond the security built into the server
itself," McGinnis added. "Previously, anyone could pull
up a console connection to any server in the data center.
Now, there are two levels of authorization before gaining
access to the servers."
McGinnis has seen significant savings in manpower and
overhead for management of the servers. "We are unable
to have administrators on duty 24/7 and the Raritan
solution is as close to providing that network support as
possible. We have seen substantial increases in productivity,
while easing the burdens on our limited IT staff," said
McGinnis. "I can sit at my desk and do configuration
changes on the fly as if I were in front of the box."
McGinnis recently encountered a situation where the
remote access functionality of IP-Reach was invaluable.
He tried to access one of his Windows 2000 servers
through Windows Terminal Services on a Sunday
afternoon to reboot. After five minutes, the box did not
respond. McGinnis then accessed the Raritan Paragon
from home and received a bad boot device error message
indicating that a floppy disk was left in the server drive.
He was able to remotely reconfigure the BIOS to bypass
the floppy drive in the boot sequence and bring the server
back up to fully operational—
all without leaving his living
room. According to McGinnis, one of his LAN
administrators had a similar experience with a Lotus Notes
server. In this case, a virtual connection was locked up and
prevented the administrator from controlling the server.
From home, she was able to access the Paragon remotely
and initiated a reboot from NT that brought the server
back up to fully operational. "We view the Raritan
solution as a productivity enhancement device that gives
our administrators more flexibility and enables them to
multitask on other IT projects."
McGinnis saw this initial engagement with Raritan as a pilot
program and intends to rollout the Paragon and IP-Reach
products to 11 other Exelon Nuclear data centers. "The
ability to have administrative access throughout our entire
organization will help us immensely by maximizing
productivity and enabling us to troubleshoot any IT issues
remotely."
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Exelon Nuclear
Largest U.S. operator of nuclear power
plants needed a KVM solution for multiplatform
support and a remote access option
to control and access servers.
Raritan's Paragon Remote KVM solution
Exelon Nuclear saved manpower and
overhead costs while maximizing uptime
though remote access to servers.
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