Welsh Water is the regulated company that provides water supply and sewerage services to over three million people living and working in Wales and some adjoining areas of England. They have 1.2 million household customers and over 110,000 business customers making them the sixth largest of the 23 regulated water companies in England and Wales and are responsible for over 25000 miles of pipes and sewers.

Their Mapping information system is at the heart of their customer service operations and enables the company to provide a responsive and efficient service. The system details the entire pipe network and is used to send engineers to work on the system.

When Welsh Water had decided to replace their mainframe-based Mapping information system with a client/server-based system, they realized that they would need systems management tools as well to ensure the smooth-running of the system. They had appointed Pafec Ltd to supply the Mapping system and we were involved in all aspects of the installation of 3 Sun E6000 servers, with Oracle 7.3.4 database software, replicated around the 3 servers. Our primary role being responsible for the set-up of the Oracle databases and replication mechanisms. The Oracle Replication functionality also used PL/SQL routines

We developed to take into account different scenarios for missed replication of data.

With the move to client/server, we also evaluated system management tools and once evaluations had been completed, assisted in the installation and configuration of the software and created the Oracle scripts required to monitor and alert on database problems. Welsh Water were able to reduce operations quite dramatically. They did this by installing the application service monitoring product, BMC PATROL^®, to proactively monitor their system and Oracle database. Patrol monitors their system resources and events such as ‘disk space’ and ‘number of database table extents’ and raises an alarm only after it has taken appropriate recovery action. With PATROL, Welsh Water were able to introduce a standby support arrangement where the on-duty manager is paged when intervention is required. Previously, they had 5 operational staff.