Informix moves ahead of the smart meter data management pack thanks to AMT-SYBEX and IBM benchmark
A new benchmark published by IBM has shown that IBM Informix TimeSeries software can burst through the smart meter data loading, storage and management bottlenecks that will be caused for utilities companies as they adopt smart meters. Tests showed that IBM Informix TimeSeries software could enable the Affinity Meterflow application from AMT-SYBEX to offer linear scalability of up to 100 million smart meters to load, validate and process for monthly billing meter data at 30-minute intervals in less than 8 hours. The time required for 10 million meters took less than 36 minutes.
Smart meters - a strategic tool for utilities
Smart meters are seen as strategic tools for utilities companies as they strive to meet government demands for them to play a greater role in helping businesses and consumers manage their energy usage and reduce their energy bills. Smart meters will also help them drive down certain operating costs by eliminating costly meter reading processes and automating back-office procedures.
In the old days, meter readings were taken by hand on a monthly basis. With smart meters, there is the potential to take readings weekly, daily, hourly, or even every few minutes. The possibilities of smart devices and intelligent instruments are vast, not only within the utilities industry but for the resulting tsunami of data that will bring a significant challenge.
Management of smart meter data is a challenge
If smart meters are to achieve their potential to provide real-time actionable intelligence, the central challenge for smart meter data management is in achieving high enough speeds to load and validate data using a meter data management (MDM) application into a database which can then enable any required data analysis and reporting in order to generate, for example, billing.
Smart meter data loading and validation at record speed
Between 2006 and 2011, load and validate rates of between 20,000 and 50,000 transactions per second were reported. Oracle announced a game-changing achievement of 1 billion load and validate transactions per hour (277,777 transactions per second) in August 2011, achieving a ten-fold improvement based upon its own MDM application. Using the AMT-SYBEX MDM application IBM has now benchmarked performance of 420,000 load and validate transactions per second whilst concurrently calculating monthly bills. Both the topline achievements in terms of scalability, and the underlying figures demonstrating speed and performance, show a quantum leap in performance versus previous benchmarks conducted by database vendors.
We extend our hearty congratulations to our customers at AMT-SYBEX and our partners at IBM.
Click the link to read the full benchmark report Unprecedented Performance and Scalability Demonstrated for Meter Data Management.
