CenterPoint Energy (CNP) is one of the many Fortune 500 companies who put their trust in SAP MaxAttention. After several years of successfully operating their Smart Meter information and analytics database, CNP needed to evaluate their approach and architecture. The primary objective was to address an end-of-life situation while improving the overall economics of managing the analytics solution. Already an SAP customer, CNP saw HANA as the “core technology” supporting their overall analytics platform and decided to validate it for effective Smart Meter data storage. A team from SAP MaxAttention was tasked with delivering a prototype that would incorporate both HANA and a data tiering solution to achieve the performance and economic benefits needed for a long-term and sustainable platform. Last month, the team successfully completed the POC and CNP will soon have a more cost-effective solution for data storage and better data-analytic capabilities.
CNP, an electric and natural gas utility company, operates in the U.S. South and Midwest. The company has over 2 million Smart Meters, which continuously generate utility data, which CNP collects, stores, and analyzes. This data is vital to CNP’s operations, as it allows them to predict future energy usage, provide customers with historical information, and is required to be retained for regulatory purposes. However, with Smart Meter data inflow reaching 2 TBs a month and an inadequate data analytics solution, CNP saw a need to transition to a more dynamic data storage and analytics framework.
“Together with SAP MaxAttention and our partners, we executed a proof of concept (POC) leveraging SAP HANA, Hadoop and SAP HANA Vora as well as other applications to simplify big data challenges. This POC is critical to re-platform our biggest data warehouse Smart Meter Analytics onto SAP HANA. The re-platforming and simplifying have resulted in a 25-50% reduction in storage cost and will become a showcase of cutting-edge data tiering technology.”
- Dominick Huang, Sr. Manager, Corporate Technology & innovation, CenterPoint Energy
The MaxAttention team came up with a solution for CNP that incorporates HANA, Dynamic Tiering (DT), HANA Vora, and Hadoop. Data is distributed across this solution using a Hot, Warm, and Cold strategy. HANA is used for storing and analyzing Hot data coming in; the DT database stores Warm data; Hadoop acts as long-term Cold data storage; and HANA Vora allows HANA to more quickly query Hadoop. This framework utilizing a fully integrated DT solution gives CNP a single-database experience on HANA while also allowing them to query all data, whether it's Hot (HANA), Warm (DT), or Cold (Hadoop). Additionally, the team incorporated Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) into the solution, which will allow CNP to set parameters for automatically tiering aged data. As new data comes in, older data can be automatically tiered and stored across HANA, DT, and Hadoop.
With the help of SAP MaxAttention, CNP is now in a position to implement a Big Data solution that will allow them to analyze more data, analyze it faster, and store it cheaper.
Interested to hear how SAP MaxAttention can bring Big Data Solutions with HANA Vora and Hadoop to your company? We are happy to help! Please email us at sapinnovationzone_coena@sap.com
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