Case Study: Tucson Electric Power achieves faster data access and $7.3M in savings with NetApp Virtual Storage Tier

Tucson Electric Power Speeds Data Access with NetApp Virtual Storage Tier

Tucson Electric Power (TEP), which serves more than 400,000 customers in southern Arizona, faced rapid data growth—expanding from about 20TB to 240TB in five years—driven by GIS, high‑resolution imagery, virtualization, and dozens of new applications. The utility needed to contain costs and improve performance for heavy I/O workloads (notably nightly executive reports) while ensuring reliable backup and disaster recovery under regulatory requirements.

TEP centralized on NetApp FAS storage and the NetApp Virtual Storage Tier (with Flash Cache, deduplication, Snapshot, and SnapMirror) and virtualized its environment with VMware. The result: performance for critical apps improved (nightly reporting runs cut from 4 to 2 hours and monthly runs from 12 to 6), storage capacity scaled more than 10× with no added headcount, CIFS volumes shrank ~80% and VMware space recovered ~50%, backups of 120TB daily and fast DR (30‑minute RTO for GIS, ~10‑minute VM recovery), and approximately $7.3 million saved in hardware and labor.

Tucson Electric Power

Chris Rima

Manager, Infrastructure Systems