Engineering a hardware and software platform capable of supporting the next generation of very smart meters is a challenging one. But a challenge that Enigin’s development team was eager to accept.
The Enigin EniscopeTM is an Internet-enabled energy meter capable of sending it’s usage data anywhere in the world. For detailed electricity monitoring resolution, the Eniscope communicates with our central hub in the UK every 5 minutes to upload it’s averaged usage data for the period. This does not sound like a particularly large problem, so let’s look at our current real-world example:
1000 Eniscopes distributed around the globe all sending their power usage data every 5 minutes to our central hub in the UK. That’s over 105,000,000 data readings each year!
But in reality, the Eniscope is one of the most advanced electricity monitoring systems in the world and sends us additional information about the customer’s power usage; values such as Voltage and Power Factor. So 1000 Eniscopes actually send us 315,000,000 data readings per year!
As you can imagine, collecting, processing and storing this vast amount of data is a complex brief that no company has encountered before. There are no ‘off the shelf’ products that fulfill these exact requirements.
In response to our customer’s needs, Enigin have developed a uniquely scalable server platform that can handle this task effortlessly, whilst also allowing for expansion and the vast potential that this industry is sitting on. Our development team has a combined industry experience of 30+ years and has worked with some of the biggest names in global business; NTT, British Telecom, Verio, Pirelli and the National Health Service to name a few!
For every 1000 Eniscopes deployed in the wild we have 18 servers in the UK that help service the demand. 14 servers handle FTP transactions from customer premises equipment (CPE). 2 servers handle the display and analysis of electricity usage information to the customer through our ePortal. 1 server acts as a controller, reporting back to our bespoke Customer Relationship Management application, Nucleus. The remaining server is configured as a backup system ensuring that data integrity is maintained and that customer usage readings are safe should disaster conditions occur.
Our database of choice is MySQL, which is the most commonly used open source database system in the world. Members of our team have professional qualifications in MySQL, which enables us to understand and exploit every feature it allows to assist with our massive data storage requirements.
The majority of our servers run a variation of UNIX that has proven to be a stable and flexible operating system with a focus on security. Unlike most companies of Enigin’s size, our in-house team develops 100% of our software applications using programming languages such as PHP, .NET, Flash, JavaScript and PERL. Employing an in-house team enables us to react very quickly to market competition and allows us to always be on the brink of innovation in terms of energy monitoring systems.
