Informix TimeSeries Smart Meter Success Stories
Informix Time Series Software has a proven track record in helping utilities companies and their technology service providers to activate effective smart meter programmes. It is at the very forefront of benchmarking performance standards for this sector as you can see from our news story and link to the very latest, late 2011 MDM benchmark from AMT-SYBEX.
Read below for some examples of how TimeSeries software is being put to work in smart metering. If you're deep in your own planning process, why not also read IBM's overview Building Smart Meter Solutions with TimeSeries.
One Italian IBM employee got so carried away he wrote a whole presentation on his real-life experiences of using an Informix-based smart meter in a home, and it has some great facts and thoughts.
Hildebrand proves Informix TimeSeries enables scalability
UK energy consultant Hildebrand describes itself as a technology incubator, and specialises in finding innovative technology solutions to some of the most challenging business problems. One such challenge was an EU project to find a cost-effective way of giving domestic energy consumers access to real time and historical / comparitive energy consumption information in order to affect behavioural changes and reduce overall energy consumption. As the technology partners on the EU’s Digital Environment Home Energy Management System (DEHEMS) project the Hildebrand team was tasked to look at how technology can be used to improve domestic energy efficiency and find a way to scale up its energy monitoring solution. They demonstrated that Informix TimeSeries software can deliver rapid load times even when working with large scale data volumes.
Read the Hildebrand Informix TimeSeries case study and find out more about their solution for the DEHEMS project.
Rational Networks help Coldset Printing Partners reduce energy consumption
TimeSeries smart metering can be used in many ways; large installations and companies can utilise smart metering solutions to monitor and reduce energy consumption too - read about how Coldset Printing Partners reduced its energy consumption thanks to an energy logging solution from Rational Networks with Informix TimeSeries software.
AMT-Sybex proves ability to scale to 3 million homes
As a provider of solutions for energy and utilities companies across Europe, AMT-SYBEX is constantly looking to develop new products and services that help its customers meet the challenges of an ever-changing industry. When the UK government announced that the introduction of smart metering technologies to all homes would be a top priority, AMT-SYBEX immediately recognised that the proposed rollout presented both a challenge and an opportunity that would soon be repeated in other global energy markets. It worked with IBM Research at the Hursley Innovation Centre, AMT-SYBEX to develop and tested Smart DTS – a solution which embeds IBM Informix TimeSeries software. During a proof of concept, the team simulated a system that received and processed data from 10 million smart meters. The solution processed more than 200,000 transactions per second, and completed the job within 96 minutes on a single eight-processor server. Loading was achieved in just 55 minutes.
Read the AMT-SYBEX TimeSeries case study and find out more about this groundbreaking smart meter solution.
Oncor creates dramatic performance improvements on same hardware
Texan electricity provider, Oncor, found its existing Oracle-based billing environment struggled to meet the demands of reporting against such large data sets. They tested Informix TimeSeries software and saw a dramatic (30x) performance increase without increasing the hardware spec. Read the Oncor Informix case study for more.
Pilot uses Informix for meter communication tool
Pilot Systems also uses Informix TimeSeries for its meter communication tool, which is industry standard in the utlity metering industry.
