By Jay Cappy, Verizon Business PS Utility Practice Lead – IT Advisory Services
This is part two of the five part blog series that discusses “Is Your Infrastructure Ready for Smart Metering?” You can view part one here.
As with any important system that you implement, you have to make hard decisions that affect the way the application is managed, how it is serviced, how it scales and the reliability and high-availability of the components. In the case of smart metering, it is one of the most important applications a utility has. It is the mechanism in which utilities bill their customers. Without accurate meter reads, utilities will not have many satisfied customers.
The following table outlines some of the criteria for high availability, reliability, manageability, serviceability and scalability:
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High availability - is a system design approach and service implementation that ensures a prearranged level of operational performance will be met.
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Automated Local and Geographic Failover, Clustering, Fault Tolerance, Redundancy, Load Balancing, Availability Management
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Reliability - the ability of a component to perform its required functions under stated conditions for a specified period of time.
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Disaster Recovery Capabilities, Patch and Release Management, Backup and Recovery capabilities, Built-in Redundancy, Component Stability, Capacity management, Configuration management Root Cause Analysis, Testing, IT Service Continuity Management
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Manageability & Serviceability - the ability of technical support personnel to install, configure, and monitor components, identify exceptions or faults, debug or isolate faults to root cause analysis, and provide hardware or software maintenance in pursuit of solving a problem and restoring the component into service.
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Documented processes and procedures, Monitoring capabilities, Capacity upgrade on demand, Event logging / tracing, Graceful degradation, upgrade planning, Maintenance & Support Management (including patch management), Incident Management, Problem Management, Configuration Management, Change Management, Defined SLAs for Service Management, Financial Management, Organization Staffing
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Scalability - is the ability of a component to handle growing amounts of work gracefully.
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Load balancing capabilities, virtualization, multi-threaded applications, performance tuning
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So what does it take to build a smart metering infrastructure?
As a part of the application architecture, you will need at a minimum the following set of high-level components:
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Network layer - which includes a FAN and a WAN
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Security layer - for the network, data and applications
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Integration layer – to provide the capability of sharing data between applications
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Data layer – to handle storage requirements, BI, analytics and reporting
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Meters – to provide the reads from the residential or commercial customers
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AMI – for the collection of data from the meters
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MDM – for the storage of the meter data and creation of billing determinants
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CIS – for the customer information and billing
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Monitoring Tools - to provide the insight into the reliability and availability of the components
Remember… you are only as reliable as your weakest link.
Of course there are still a lot of decisions to make based on the business requirements. The network, security, integration and data layers have many sub-components. For the backhaul, do I go mesh, wireless or Wi-Fi? What are the best meters? Which AMI and MDM components will meet most of my business requirements? Should I replace or refresh my CIS system? But another major key to all of your business requirements are your non-functional requirements (which are typically down-played or overlooked). What are your requirements for high availability, reliability, manageability, serviceability and scalability for each of the components? If your system is down, will you set up manual or automated steps to bring it back on-line?
Feel free to share your thoughts here.
This blog was also posted on Think Forward.
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