MOSCOW, Oct. 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Krasnoyarsk Hydropower Plant today announced the implementation of a workload-optimized solution of IBM hardware and software that has improved the plant's business processes by 50 percent and dramatically reduced the number of interrupted operations.

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Krasnoyarsk Hydropower Plant is Russia's second largest energy-producing plant, according to the amount of electricity produced, and is listed as one of the world's top ten, serving 2.5 million people. It is the primary generator of electricity in the Krasnoyarsk region and one of the country's most cost-efficient.

But the plant's IT infrastructure has not fared so well. Until recently, the IT environment was managed and monitored through a variety of loosely-connected legacy systems that were riddled with process inefficiencies. As a result, system alerts that pointed to IT trouble were delayed, which slowed IT recoveries and often led to lengthy outages.

That's when Krasnoyarsk turned to IBM and its smarter computing approach to IT. The plant's main goals: maintain reliability and continuity by ensuring efficient control over the system architecture.

"Uninterrupted access to information and fault tolerance of IT systems are crucial for energy companies," said I. Yudina, CIO of the Krasnoyarsk Hydropower Plant. "We had to ensure realtime monitoring of the operating systems on which our ERP runs - AIX and Linux. IBM Tivoli software monitors the status of all IT infrastructure components in realtime, thus helping us address any potential problem before an outage occurs."

The new IT architecture comprises IBM BladeCenter blade servers, the high performance and scalable IBM System Storage DS4700 Express, IBM System Storage TS3200 Tape Library Express Model, and IBM Tivoli Monitoring software that manages the health of the infrastructure, including servers, operating systems and databases.

As a result, the power plant is able to optimize systems across every layer to manage diverse workloads and ensure uninterrupted operation of its IT systems in realtime. Key data management processes now run 50 percent faster than before, while system reliability has increased significantly to help prevent future electricity outages. Also, in the event of a malfunction, an employee is now alerted via text message within seconds.

"IBM performs smart energy projects all over the world, and we are happy to leverage our international experience in this strategic sector of the Russian economy," said Alexey Kaminsky, industrial account manager at IBM Russia and CIS. "The improved performance of management processes and uninterrupted IT operation achieved at the plant showcases our centralized approach to the IT management in an energy company."

IBM worked with local business partner Computel to develop the system.

About Krasnoyarsk and the Krasnoyarsk Hydropower Plant

The city of Krasnoyarsk, the third largest city in Siberia, is an important industrial center and one of Russia's most important producers of aluminium. For more information about the Krasnoyarsk Hydropower Plant, visit: http://www.kges.ru/?q=comp

About IBM in Russia and CIS

As part of its geographic expansion initiative to increase its presence in emerging, high-growth cities and regions, IBM opened an office in Krasnoyarsk in 2008. IBM has fourteen offices across the Russia and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region including Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Perm, Ekaterinburg, Samara, Rostov-on-Don, Kazan, Ufa, Kiev, Dnipropetrovsk, Almaty and Tashkent. For more information about IBM and its products, visit ibm.com/ru.

About Computel

For more information about the company, visit: http://www.computel.ru/en/company/

Mike Zimmerman
IBM Media Relations (U.S.)
mrzimmerman@us.ibm.com
(914) 766-4935

Svetlana Stavreva
IBM Media Relations (Austria)
stavreva@at.ibm.com
+43-1-21145-4083

SOURCE IBM