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IBM recently announced that together with Hildebrand they’ve been able to gather 50.000 energy measurements per second using IBM’s top database products in a single computer. I am delighted to see this trend, as more and more organizations are seeing the value in gathering energy data in a holistic way.
The energy grid is, however, inherently distributed and requires very high reliability from any system (Smart Grid) that is to be rolled out on top of it. This is why we at BaseN strive to always maintain scalability, military grade fault tolerance and distributed architecture.
Many IT providers that are now eyeing utilities as potential Smart Grid customers may not realize that most existing utility systems have been designed with 30+ years lifecycle. While it is true that the legacy systems have not evolved much and are now prone to computer viruses of the 90’s, a current IT solutions with 3-5 year replacement stragegy may be even worse.
An optimal solution is a new kind of architecture in which both 300 year lifecycle and continuous development are possible. Software-as-a-Service, maybe added with Hardware (SHaaS?) is the obvious answer.
//Pasi
