Taki Remtulla
Chief Technology Officer
Abilita
tremtulla@abilita.com

There has been a lot of news in the press recently about SMART electrical grids. Cisco recently announced that Smart Grids will eclipse the size of the Internet and furthermore, Google announced its plans to launch Home Energy Management software. Cisco's move is a sign that the creaky electricity distribution system is poised for a digital upgrade. Other high-tech companies, including IBM, Intel, and several start-ups, are ramping up smart-grid efforts to capitalize on expected investments from utilities and federal governments

Cisco estimates that the communications’ portion of the Smart Grid build-out is worth $100 billion over the next five years. This comes as no surprise, given the governments around the world are announcing major smart grid initiatives, such as the Obama administration’s recovery plan for the US and the European budget commitments on such infrastructure.

The idea of the smart grid is to modernize the electricity industry by overlaying digital communications onto the grid. Smart meters in a person's home, for example, can communicate energy usage to utilities in near real time. That allows the utility to more efficiently manage the electricity supply and potentially allows a consumer to take advantage of cheaper rates. Germany has many great examples of new smart grid architectures where consumers can also supply power to the grid, arrange for their own meter, and subscribe to different energy providers.

But putting smarts into the utility grid is not just about overlying a communications network on top of the electrical distribution system. For smart grids to yield maximum benefits, it has to be about more than just relyaing usage data from the consumers back to the utility – it has to be about automating the entire power distribution system, so that it can respond to demand and supply parameters dynamically and in real time. In other words, the two infrastructures must be tightly integrated, so control algorithms can be developed and applied for features such as load balancing. This level of integration now presents major challenges for the smart grid developers, including IBM and Cisco.

Smart grid communications equipment will have to be tough to operate under severe environmental conditions. For example, equipment on utility poles needs to support operating in temperatures ranging from -35 degrees to +125 degrees F. The current communications equipment simply doesn’t support those requirements. At the same time, utilities equipment is designed to last 40 years. No one will want to go out to a transformer station and replace network cards every three years.

Telcos are also looking to get into the business of home energy management. One major challenge for telecom operators looking at the smart grid opportunity is reliability, which rules out open networks such as GSM. For smart grids, dedicated spectrum or bandwidth is needed to ensure that when the carrier’s network experiences congestion, the smart grid communications don’t get impacted. This model essentially outlines the need for a dedicated, robust network with a very high degree of security to run smart grids.

So you can see that the need for communications network design is still ever present and telecom/technology optimization is now reaching into the energy management space.

Taki Remtulla
Chief Technology Officer
Abilita
tremtulla@abilita.com

The untold secret of modern business is that there is a revolution sweeping through corporate data centres.

The information factories of the digital age are going through a transition that is every bit as significant to business as the advent of the moving assembly line was to manufacturing nearly a century ago.

Companies that master the new techniques of information processing - or make the right decisions about when to hand over control of that operation to someone with the right skills - stand to reap benefits in the form of lower costs and greater data usability. However, all comes with significant risks, not only of falling behind as information processing enters a new industrial-scale era, but also of losing control of a key business asset: information.

The shift is happening largely out of view. Guarded by the IT department and locked away from prying eyes for security reasons, data centres operate beyond the average business manager’s realm of consciousness. The places where the inner workings of business are conducted - where invoices are processed, transactions are recorded, and corporate secrets are stored - are often taken for granted.

The past quarter-century was characterized by a decentralization of computing, with information processing and storage placed on every desktop and laptop. The coming era is set to bring greater consolidation of computing power in “clouds,” or large-scale distributed computing facilities. Even Microsoft, a company that came to dominate the PC era, is racing to create one of the world’s biggest computing clouds, although it insists this will co-exist with existing forms of personal computing for years to come.

This shift was spurred by the economies of scale that come from consolidating computing in fewer places, and the availability of fast Internet connections that make it easy to tap into this resource. As a result, data centres - whether run by large companies or by Internet services groups such as Google, Yahoo, and Amazon - are assuming an increased share of the world’s information processing workload.

“Cloud computing” has become useful shorthand for a trend that has shown signs of accelerating as the concept of software-as-a-service and the outsourcing of raw computing power are adopted more widely. While Internet companies are creating “public clouds,” many big companies like GE say they are creating private ones of their own, even as they weigh the benefits of shifting some of their computing to the outside services suppliers.

The new form of outsourced computing involves the provision of raw data processing power and storage capacity. Companies buy access to someone else’s data centres to boost their own capacities in times of need - or sometimes they replace their data centres altogether. Amazon.com has emerged as the unlikely early leader in this business. Being able to tap into massive data storage and processing power at a low cost - and having access to it at the drop of a hat, rather than waiting for an IT department to procure and provide it - means companies will be able to deal with their customers more intelligently.

A lot will depend on how companies use these new resources and how they meet the rising expectations of customers who have been taught by modern Internet services to expect instant gratification.