Smart Grid Demands Smarter IT

By Ron Potter, TeamQuest Corporation

As grids become more intelligent, they have to be supported by even more sophisticated IT systems. That demands platforms that can ramp up and ramp down rapidly according to the dictates of market forces.

“It is essential that ongoing initiatives to add more intelligence to the energy infrastructure are backed up by IT tools that provide enough flexibility to cope with rapid change”
-Ron Potter, TeamQuest

In such a world, IT tends to suffer from two major challenges – under-provisioning and over-provisioning. Both can be solved via automated capacity planning and performance management software that contains enough flexibility to accurately predict traffic patterns and growth trends while being able to detect unexpected peaks and troughs, and make the necessary adjustments.

Right-sizing capacity
Capacity planning makes it possible to know if the current infrastructure is adequate to cope with the addition of new applications or a greatly increased traffic volume. If more resources are called for, capacity planning highlights how much extra equipment needs to be deployed. And with so much top management attention on smart grid initiatives, such automated tools enable IT to load up existing systems with greater workloads without causing a bottleneck. Thus it becomes possible to maximize the ability of systems to respond to market volatility.

Capacity planning also reaps big rewards by revealing what IT assets are already in place. There is hardly an energy company in the nation that can honestly say it knows the location and role of every server in its midst. By conducting such an inventory automatically, capacity planning software permits optimization of what is currently in place. In many cases, this action reveals large pockets of un-harnessed resources that can be corralled to cope with ongoing expansion.

Performance management
While capacity planning could be characterized as a crystal ball, performance management is the troubleshooter. Despite the most meticulous planning, unforeseen circumstances sometimes result. Whether due to massive spikes in demand, a local blackout or the impact of uncontrolled application roll out, IT departments must occasionally deal with performance degradation. The challenge is to quickly isolate the source so the proper remedial actions can be executed. With the right tools in place, energy companies can stay one step ahead of trouble.

It is advisable, for instance, to always monitor metrics concerning the utilization of processing power, memory and the network. Thus when an issue shows up, it is relatively easy to drill down into the affected area to discover the application, server or business unit responsible.

This directly correlates to the bottom line. Instead of throwing more servers, more disk capacity, more bandwidth or more powerful processors at the issue, performance management often reveals specific areas of bottleneck that can be reorganized for optimum throughput and availability.

Ongoing process
Once conducted, capacity plans should be repeated annually to take into account growth rates and changes in the environment. Further, in an organization that has to deal with huge traffic volumes or rapidly fluctuating loads, interim capacity plans should be done at least every three months. Ad-hoc reports should also be carried out to verify all is well and to investigate unusual occurrences or to follow up on unusual patterns. This should be carried out in tandem with ongoing performance management to detect and prevent bottlenecks from materially affecting system performance.

Further, in an era of smart meters and smart grids, it is essential that ongoing initiatives to add more intelligence to the energy infrastructure are backed up by IT tools that provide enough flexibility to cope with rapid change and enough prediction about future trends to prevent system bottlenecks. It is only a matter of time before we begin to see news stories about state-of-the-art energy infrastructure being constrained due to inadequate or overloaded IT resources. The way to avoid this fate is to include proven capacity planning and performance management techniques and technologies as part of any smart grid implementation.

For more information call 641 357 2700 or visit www.teamquest.com.

Ron Potter is IT best practice manager at TeamQuest, and has been involved in IT for 30 years, working in a number of industries including gaming, banking, IT service and healthcare. Prior to TeamQuest, Ron was involved with a multi-year IT improvement initiative at a major healthcare company that embraced ITIL.