UIL Holdings Corporation

The Customer

Headquartered in New Haven, Connecticut, UIL Holdings Corporation (NYSE:UIL) is a diversified energy-delivery company serving approximately 706,000 electric and natural gas utility customers in 66 communities across two states. UIL Holdings companies have all been serving their communities for over 100 years.

UIL Holdings is the parent company for The United Illuminating Company (UI), The Southern Connecticut Gas Company (SCG), Connecticut Natural Gas Corporation (CNG), and The Berkshire Gas Company (Berkshire Gas).

The Challenge

Before Infoblox came in, UIL was in search of a network-automation solution as well as a distributed DNS and DHCP solution. With the acquisition of multiple gas companies and the deployment of enterprise VoIP to many distributed locations, a centralized DNS and DHCP server was no longer an ideal solution.

UIL was also looking for an appliance-based solution to reduce the compliance burdens of deploying the solution within their regulated infrastructure. Goals of this solution goals included ease of maintenance, reliability, availability, and security. UIL choose an onsite solution for compliance reasons as well as to meet the need for ultimate reliability during critical weather events.

The Solution

In 2012, UIL installed Infoblox solutions running on purpose-built hardware appliances connected by the patented Infoblox Grid™ architecture. One factor in selecting Infoblox was the prior experience of Jeremy Parkins, IL Holdings’ director of information and security, and other members of his team who had worked with the solution before at other jobs. They knew first-hand how reliable the Infoblox Grid is for distributed solutions.

“We knew that with Infoblox,” says Parkins, “we’d get a complete, one-vendor, best-of-breed solution. The tight-nit user community and user groups in our region were also a deciding factor in the solution.”
“NetMRI is yielding enormous benefits in change and configuration management, which we previously had to perform manually.”

The Results

One benefit Parkins cites is productivity gains from the visibility provided by the NetMRI network automation solution. “We’ve got a new core system going in,” he says, “and NetMRI is yielding enormous benefits in change-and-configuration management, which we previously had to perform manually.”

The Infoblox appliances were another key advantage. Appliance-based solutions offer key compliance benefits due to their integrated nature and proprietary hardware and software. They also tend to be easier to keep up to date. As the compliance burden increases across the industry, solutions like NetMRI configuration management will not only make managing the environment easier, but will also simplify meeting compliance requirements.

Perkins reserves his highest praise, however, for the system’s reliability “We recently experienced a large connectivity disruption in our data center,” he says, “and due to the excellent high-availability design, we never missed a beat. The Infoblox Grid Master handed off its data and its processing load as advertised.”