European Utility Week (#EUW13) started on Tuesday in Amsterdam. Over the three days, a number of key players in the industry attended to take part in the biggest smart-energy event in Europe. Just last week, we announced our new line of products, which are a huge part of the smart energy story. Working closely with McAfee and Wind River, the Intelligent IoT Gateway and new versions of Quark and Atom are our latest offerings to the energy industry, and we’d like to tell you more about them.
Over the past few years, our broad product portfolio has helped to develop the concept of the Smart Grid, and we’ve quietly been helping to deliver the ‘building blocks’ which help make the industry tick. As the grid becomes more reliant on digital services, data is playing a huge part in energy services. Data is constantly being collected, released and analysed, which helps us find ways to improve its efficiency. Typically, the Intel Xeon based servers via software stacks such as SAP HANA, Oracle Analytics and/or Hadoop installations are the components at the forefront of data analysis. Out of the critical infrastructure that is the Grid, our Intel Core i5/i7 vPro based systems are the primary support for areas such as substation automation wind turbine control. Technology itself has been a major point of discussion in the energy industry, whilst the impact of ‘big data’ and the increasing demand for the implementation of cyber security is apparent.
The fundamental issue which everyone was facing is that vast amounts of investment have already been made and deployed in the existing grid. Ideally, we would replace all legacy devices with the latest, most advanced technology. However, in the real-world, such rapid upgrades are simply not economically viable, nor physically feasible.
What was needed was a scalable “Internet of things” gateway solution, which would enable customers to either migrate their existing software stack on to a new virtualised gateway platform, or simply add a ‘bump in the wire’ gateway. Both of these solutions would provide the security and connectivity required by today’s Smart Grid to the legacy device. Intel, McAfee and Wind River have developed an integrated pre-validated hardware and software stack to their partners, which will enable faster prototyping and thus time to market advantage. As well as the benefit of integration, the stack will combine Intel’s SoC’s, with all their built-in functionality, Wind River’s Intelligent Device Platform and McAfee’s Embedded Control.
The other important question bears relevance to the opinions of our own partners and customers. When we ask our customers: ‘So how much computing power will you need in the device?..’ the answers were often along the lines of: ‘We do not know exactly but what we do know is that once we start to acquire the data in real time, we’ll find new ways of analysing it to derive value…so we will need more computing performance… ’. This seems to allude to the concept of scalability management – an idea that both Quark and Atom can provide a solution to. Along with the help of Core i5/i7 based gateways, our partners will have the opportunity to build a solution on Intel’s architecture and ‘scale’, simply replacing the gateway as they wish.
This is why European Utility Week is a major date in our calendar. The volume of customer requests we’ve received for more information and meetings is huge, and we believe these new additions to our portfolio have the potential to help revolutionise the evolution of a Smarter Grid. Thus, European Utility Week is an ideal opportunity to showcase our existing assets, and exhibit our proud new products.
Kevin O'Donovan, Intel Corporation
