IBM and AMT-SYBEX demonstrate the capability of the IBM® Informix® TimeSeries software to enable the Affinity Meterflow™ application to offer linear scalability up to 100 million meters to load and process meter data at 30-minute intervals in less than 8 hours. The time required for 10 million meters took less than 36 minutes.
Understanding the significance of this benchmark may help energy and utilities organizations as well as Meter Data Management (MDM) solution providers to:
- Deploy best-in-class meter data management solutions
- Dramatically reduce storage and system costs
- Accelerate time-to-value gained from smart meter data
- Reduce risk of smart meter deployments
- Help protect growing smart meter investments
These benchmark results show that Informix TimeSeries software is able to break the bottleneck of massive MDM and deliver significant business benefits to utility organizations, as well as to ISVs offering packaged MDM solutions such as Affinity Meterflow™ from AMT-SYBEX.
Informix Flexible Grid
As the cornerstone of Smart Grid initiatives and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), smart meters promise to deliver significant benefits to energy and utilities organizations and their consumers. Smart meters fundamentally change how and when energy usage data is collected. The result is a tsunami of data that must be processed, transferred, stored and analyzed, creating unforeseen technical challenges and business risks for which many utility organizations are not prepared.
As AMI initiatives increase, how does a buyer compare one MDM solution to another? Armed with the knowledge that MDM will create data storage and performance challenges, how does a buyer know the amount of systems and storage that will be needed or whether service-level agreement goals have been met? Answers to these questions are determined by many factors, including the database system that sits at the core of all MDM solutions, whether packaged or home-grown. Does it matter which data management solution is used?
The answer is decidedly yes.
IBM has conducted several Proof of Concepts (PoCs) with a number of companies using Informix TimeSeries as the enabling technology in the customer’s own MDM applications. In each PoC, Informix TimeSeries consistently outperformed the customer’s existing solutions, at times enabling up to 50 to 70 times faster processing of meter data, while requiring as little as 30 percent of the storage. The benchmark was conceived and conducted to illustrate these benefits in tangible ways. It tested the preparation, loading and validation, estimation and editing (VEE) of meter data for a 10 million–meter utility, as well as a “day-in-the-life” scenario for a 100 million–meter utility. If you compare the performance of Affinity Meterflow with other MDM solution offerings that do not use Informix TimeSeries software, we believe you will conclude that these performance and scalability results are exceptional.
The results of this benchmark demonstrate the substantial business value that use of Informix TimeSeries combined with a proven MDM application can deliver to the energy and utilities industry. We invite the reader to compare these results with other published benchmark results.
- Faster processing of meter data means faster business processes that use that data!
- Achieved daily billing calculations of 21,000 bills per minute while concurrently running the data load.
- Significant reduction in storage requirements.
- Total storage required for 1 month of interval and register data for 100M meters was less than 4 terabytes, a fraction of the storage required by any other competing solution.
- Average throughput exceeded 420,000 records/second in meter data load using standard storage disks.
- Consistent, scalable performance helps yield highly predictable costs.
- Daily end-to-end processing times remained constant for 100M meters over a 31 day period, irrespective of the amount of data stored.
- Storage requirements remained linear over time.
Real-world Experiences
Proving the concept for smart metering data management ... IBM Research works with AMT-SYBEX to develop and test Smart DTS
Working with IBM Research at the Hursley Innovation Centre, AMT-SYBEX developed and tested Smart DTS, a smart meter management solution built on IBM Infomix technology. During a proof of concept, the team simulated a system that received and processed data from 10 million smart meters, achieving excellent per...
Hildebrand solves a key problem in smart metering research ... With IBM Informix technologies for time-series data management
Working with the software laboratory at IBM Hursley, Hildebrand ran several proofs-of-concept and created a solution based on IBM Informix technologies that has the potential to collect, store and analyse detailed energy usage information from millions of homes in real time.
Informix TimeSeries will sit at core of UK Smart Energy Cloud
IBM and Cable&Wireless Worldwide announced their collaboration to develop a new intelligent data and communications solution, UK Smart Energy Cloud, using Informix TimeSeries to support the UK's Smart Meter Implementation Program which aims to rollout more than 50 million smart meters in the UK.
Coldset Printing Partners ... The IBM Informix TimeSeries solution helps company track usage trends and analyze data over time
The IBM Informix TimeSeries solution helps the company track usage trends and analyze data over time.