PORTLAND, ME — (Marketwire) — 09/25/12 — Reinforcing its leadership in advanced communications for automation and further proving the company-s insight, today joined forces with DST Controls to better forecast and manage energy demand for a well-known, Salt Lake City e-commerce data center. Responding to requests from the data center-s power supplier, DST and Kepware set out to better automate the energy usage management process. View the complete .
DST Controls is a full-service control systems and industrial data integration company that services customers on five continents. The company-s core offering is automated control and monitoring of industrial equipment, processes, and data. When their customer, a Salt Lake City e-commerce provider, needed help addressing energy requirements — they turned to Kepware for help.
“Our e-commerce customer was called on by Rocky Mountain Power to provide more accurate information on energy usage. This was critical as the utility is required to balance load and supply power in real-time,” said Greg Dumas, DST Chief Technology Officer. “Monitoring is essential as even a few minutes of warning of demand changes make significant differences in power reliability and cost.”
Comprised of 300,000 square feet, the e-commerce data center is staffed by 50 people with 8,000 computers that process web-based orders and shipping information. In the past, collection of data was a very timely process. Dumas said that this type of information is normally very difficult to provide and a highly manual process, “Many customers and utilities manage demand and supply by dispatching their engineers to spend hours creating spreadsheets and calling each other with their latest out-of-date forecasts.”
With manual processes costing unnecessary expenditures of time and money, the data center turned to DST to deliver a more sophisticated method of managing energy load information. The solution would be required to monitor a broad range of physical signals in the data center. For DST and its data center customer, the real issue was how to implement industrial automation to keep all systems connected.
The answer was found via Kepware and its award-winning KEPServerEX®. The KEPServerEX is designed to connect disparate devices — from plant control systems to enterprise information systems. The tool has proven interoperability through drivers and client connectivity for isolated automation systems. KEPServerEX brings centralized communications through a single communications platform, while providing plug-and-play drivers and client interfaces to enable on-demand scalability.
With the integrated solution, data is exchanged using OSIsoft and Kepware — with more than 106 million transactions taking place every day. The Kepware solution monitors approximately 2,000 I/O points; DST reads all servers- power and stores it in a database where Kepware pulls this information from the drivers.
In the end, all parties benefited from the system, which only took approximately two months to develop and deploy. Learn the full details. Download the complimentary , to read additional challenges, connectivity insights as well as benefits derived:
Kepware Technologies, established in 1995, develops a wide range of communication and interoperability software solutions for the Automation industry. Our flexible and scalable solutions are for connecting, managing, monitoring, and controlling diverse automation devices and software applications. Our industry endorsed software solutions improve operations and decision-making throughout all levels of an organization. Kepware Technologies- mission is to be “Your Standard for Connectivity.”
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