Itron Meter Data Management Program Completes Benchmark Test

Sept. 26, 2007
Itron Inc. has announced another successful round of scalability and performance benchmark testing for its Itron Enterprise Edition Meter Data Management product.

Itron Inc. has announced a successful round of scalability and performance benchmark testing for its Itron Enterprise Edition (IEE) Meter Data Management product. The tests confirm IEE’s ability to support advanced metering system installations of more than 10 million meters, representing the largest scale benchmarking test in the meter data management (MDM) industry to date.

Itron has more than 20 utility customers that are licensed to use IEE Meter Data Management, representing more than 14 million meters, said Eric Miller, vice president of Itron software solutions.

The new series of tests looked at the full range of data processing requirements for large scale advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) deployments. The scope of testing also included interval meter data import, data validation, estimation and storage as well as time-of-use (TOU) calculations and billing exports for more than five million meters.

Using Itron Enterprise Edition Meter Data Management's high-volume AMI import and export services, Itron has achieved the level of performance and scalability required to exceed the demands of full scale AMI deployments. The benchmark tests were performed at an independent facility of one of top five global system integrators using the Oracle 10g database. The tests were performed using functionality available with Itron’s standard product in the current release of IEE, Release 5.3.

The following is a summary of the results.

Interval Meter Data Import, Validation and Estimation: IEE MDM successfully completed the import, validation and storage of over 190 million reads in a two-hour processing window, achieving a sustained transaction rate of 26,400 intervals per second. This test included interval data and a daily register read for over 5 million AMI meters with a mix of hourly and 15-minute data. As part of the test, IEE MDM executed eight distinct validation checks most commonly proposed for residential AMI meters. These checks include high/low validations on usage and demand and actual vs. historical usage and demand checks. In addition, IEE MDM performed historical estimation on over 250,000 meters with long data gaps. All validation and estimation rules were performed within the same two-hour period.

Calculations and Export: The benchmark test also included converting one month of interval data into three time-of-use values and exporting those billing determinants for each meter. IEE MDM successfully executed these calculations and exported the results for 500,000 meters in three hours. This benchmark performed the daily pre-billing calculations required for a 10 million meter utility that offers time-based rates to all of its customers.

The benchmark test also demonstrated that Itron's high volume import and export services scale linearly with additional computing hardware.

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