Tennessee Valley Authority Success Story

Overview
Eleven fossil fuel plants.
Twenty-nine hydro-electric dams.
Three nuclear plants.
Four combustion-turbine plants.
A pumped-storage facility.
17,000 miles of transmission lines.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a unique federal corporation. First and foremost, it is the largest public power company in the United States, providing power to nearly eight million residents in seven states. The TVA also serves as the steward of the Tennessee River system and is a regional economic development agency.

Challenge
Over seven years ago, the Telecom/Network Engineering and Unix Systems Support teams for the TVA determined that a common and accurate time source was needed to accurately provide time for network and computer system logging. More importantly, they wanted to completely eliminate the need to access a Network Time Protocol (NTP) time source through the TVA firewalls in order to avoid system compromise.

Solution
Rick Berube, Systems Engineer, Enterprise Operations/Systems Engineering, said, "Consequently, we decided to purchase a TymServe as a NTP Stratum 1 source. The TVA has bought two additional TymServe units to meet the needs of our huge network, giving us a simple, cost-effective method to avoid system compromise while reliably synchronizing hundreds of devices."

The decision to buy TymServe followed upon the decision that NTP was the protocol providing the most accurate mechanism to support an accurate distribution of time to a geographically dispersed network, such as the one at the TVA. Rick added, "Our research into NTP support provided by Dr. David Mills’ landmark reference implementation of NTP led us to the Symmetricom product. Dr. Mills has been an active contributor to the field of computer network time synchronization. Protocols he developed, prototyped and deployed have evolved into the Network Time Protocol (NTP)."

Results
According to Rick, "Best of all, we have had no problems with the Tymserve products. For the geosynchronous week rollover in August 1999, Symmetricom provided us with a firmware upgrade and installation instructions that were easy to use. The three TymServe units at TVA have performed above expectations. We know that our firewalls are secure and we have a trustworthy time source."

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