Information Technology Update

ERCOT Board of Directors MeetingJanuary 17th, 2005

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System Outage Time line

Outage Time line

12/25

9:29 pm

First drive fails

Replacement scheduled by

10:37pm

12/26

5:34 am

Second drive fails

12/26

1 pm

NAESB Recovery

begins

Assessment, recovery planning

12/26

10:30 pm

1st market notice sent

12/27

11:00 pm

TCH Recovery

begins

12/28

2:00 am

NAESB transactions started

12/30

12:00 am

TCH Online

1/1/06

11:15 pm

Retail Systems

online

1/4/06

Siebel Daily Extracts Posted

Replicated Lodestar Current

1/5/06

Siebel Full extracts posted

Recovery completed

(extracts)

1/15/06

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System Outage What Happened?

RAID – Redundant Array of Independent disk

RAID 5 - Block Interleaved Distributed Parity: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. Level 5 is one of the most popular implementations of RAID (Webophedia 2006)

Data

Data

Data

Parity

Spindle

(ERCOT runs more than 2000 spindles in SAN environment)

RAID 5 Array

Track

Each spindle contains usable data and parity data

for other drives in the array.

If one drive fails, the parity data on the other drives

rebuilds the missing drive from the parity tracks of the

working drives.

First drive failed 12/25 at 9:29

Second drive failed 12/26 at

5:34

Note: 1 additional drive for parity indexing not depicted

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System Outage Review Steps

Data Storage Management Processes

—EMC (Data Storage Vendor) engagement• Staff augmentation and consulting• Administer storage environment• Review ERCOT storage processes and procedures• Recommend changes per “Best Practices” if appropriate

Technology—“Hot Swap” implementation—Third layer of protection

People—Review of skills in Storage area—Provide additional training if needed—Review of Management structure

5© Property of ERCOT 2005

Market Redesign Time line and Critical Path

•For effort estimation assumed 1/1/2009 for Go Live•With 3 months for Pilot and 6 months for Mock Market, 27 months remain to complete all Nodal projects•A number of Nodal projects are now on the critical path (require ~27 months to deliver)

•NMMS, NSA Enhancements, Settlements and Billing, EDW framework, and Nodal training

6© Property of ERCOT 2005

Market Redesign Project Cost Estimate

Ground Up Approach• ~735,000 estimated hours• 86 projects/initiatives anticipated• ~50 ERCOT employees require backfill• ~40 external contractors

Project cost• $95 - $130 million• Previous CBA $59.4 – 76.2 million

• Key differences • Hardware estimated around $40 million

• Several minor differences in labor and assumptions

• CA-ISO publicly disclosed estimate $139.2 million

7© Property of ERCOT 2005

IT Update Accomplishments

Improved Change and Release Management Capacity Plan development Key upgrades/implementations

• Release 3 and Release 4• LodeStar 3.7• Siebel 7.7• Texas Set 2.1

Service Oriented Architecture Market Redesign efforts

• Protocol reviews• Readiness planning

Outstanding group of people across all of ERCOT!!!