Case Study: Greenville Utilities Commission achieves 24/7 system availability and rapid disaster recovery with NetApp

Raising the Bar on Operational Efficiency for a North Carolina Utility Service

Greenville Utilities, a North Carolina utility serving about 150,000 customers, depends on 24/7 access to integrated enterprise applications (billing, customer service, asset management, field operations). The challenge was performing frequent patches, updates, testing, and disaster recovery without disrupting real‑time systems—previously cloning took a week and replication could take 8–12 hours, risking customer downtime and significant data loss.

Using NetApp FlexPod with SnapMirror and FlexClone, Greenville moved to instant short‑term clones and rapid replication, reducing copy time from a week to seconds, enabling a two‑hour patch window that’s ~90% automated, cutting potential data loss to under an hour, and enabling DR failover in about 40 minutes. The result is improved operational efficiency, minimal customer disruption during updates, faster disaster recovery, and greater confidence in continuous service delivery.

Greenville Utilities Commission

Todd Cannon

Senior Server and Security Analyst