eMeter Corporation, the global leader in Smart Grid Management software, announced successful benchmark testing for 20 million smart meters with EnergyIP, eMeter’s flagship Meter Data Management product. At over four times the scale of any other industry benchmark, the tests prove the ability of EnergyIP to handle all points of data transfer and processing in real-time for the largest grid management deployments; including the capability to generate all billing determinants by 9am to enable same day bill printing and mailing.

Performed at IBM’s Innovation Center for Business Partners in San Mateo, California, testing was done with a full multi-tenancy configuration, the most complex large-scale extended enterprise scenario. In multi-tenancy configurations, a single system serves the requirements of multiple utilities or individual regions of a very large utility. These utility organizations are becoming increasingly common as the Smart Grid takes shape. For example, American Electric Power (AEP,) is serving Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, through multiple operating companies, or Canada’s IESO which provides centralized metering services for more than 80 distribution companies within Ontario Province. eMeter is at the forefront of enabling this industry trend supporting customers in North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region. This testing validates eMeter’s ability to support billing based on interval meter data as these large-scale Smart Grid deployments continue to grow.

The benchmark, leveraging the power of IBM’s mid-range 64 processor, p6-based application and data base servers, with DS4100 storage, completed runs for 20 million service delivery points. Testing included scenarios for 15 minute and hourly intervals as well as simultaneous validation and bill determinate processing to effectively handle the terabytes of data required of large-scale deployments. These tests are a testament to EnergyIP’s real-time message-based architecture, which allows incremental additions of computing power with near-linear increases in capacity. EnergyIP’s unique approach eliminates software bottlenecks at both the application and database server levels to enable consistent scaling.

“Our customers can be confident that their investments will be successful over the lifetime of their smart energy initiatives. These results with IBM are a testament to the scalability of a true Service Oriented Architecture,” said Larsh Johnson, CTO, eMeter. “Even beyond 20 million meters, it’s exciting to know that as requirements grow you can incrementally add computing power and EnergyIP throughput will grow in step. It’s no longer a question of whether the software can scale, but, how soon will systems reach this scale?”