<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-family: Calibri;">(Conway, SC) -- Horry Electric Cooperative, Inc. was organized April 24, 1940 with 627 charter members. Today, the Cooperative serves nearly 64,000 active meters through 22 substations across more than 4,000 miles of distribution line in Horry County.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Of the 20 electric cooperatives in South Carolina, they are the fourth largest. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since 2002, Horry County and Horry Electric have experienced tremendous growth, making them #1 in terms of annual meter growth.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-family: Calibri;">With rapidly growing storage and expanding application requirements, the HEC staff was very interested in virtualization using VMware’s Enterprise virtualization platform.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  <!--more--></span>In addition to server virtualization, storage consolidation was another initiative expressed by the HEC staff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">   </span>eGroup was able to present a storage and virtualization design that would not only accomplish HEC’s current initiatives, but provide them flexibility for future expansion.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">eGroup created a design based upon a capacity planner engagement with HEC that analyzed the performance of the existing systems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>With this analysis, eGroup was able to identify existing hardware that could be utilized for the VMware ESX servers, as well as determine the requirements of the infrastructure needed to support the environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> A shared storage solution was also developed out of this analysis using EMC’s Clariion CX4 series array.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-family: Calibri;">eGroup was also tasked to implement the proposed solution and train the HEC staff on the new systems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>eGroup was able to implement and migrate all physical servers to the new virtual environment successfully in just a few days. </span><span style="font-size: small; font-family: Calibri;">The result was a decrease in physical servers from 30 down to 9, which also resulted in freed rack space and reduced power and cooling requirements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>The storage consolidation phase enabled HEC to be much more flexible in its storage requirements.</span></p>