CONSERVATION MEASURES
It was the company's new policy to limit e-mail storage on its messaging servers and shared drives that finally drove Southern to build an archival system. Employees now must delete any e-mail that's not business-critical and use Outlook PST files sparingly to avoid bogging down Southern's storage.
"A lot of our data growth has been from users cleaning up their e-mail boxes because they're limited to a megabyte of storage for Exchange," Commer says. "One thing we want to stop is the storing of messages outside Exchange." That's because Southern can better control and retrieve business-critical messages if they're stored on the Exchange servers, she says.
The company's hefty internal applications have also put the squeeze on data-storage space. Southern's homegrown TCMS (Trouble Call Management System) application, for example, uses heavy graphics and GIS (geographical information system) data to help the company detect where a power outage has occurred, Commer says. When a customer calls in an outage, the location of his or her residence is illuminated on an electronic map so the utility can determine the location of the downed substation or transformer.
Southern also runs several applications that store geographic and hydroelectric information, and several applications that map the lakes and land the utility manages for its power generation and resources.
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