Itron Inc. has announced the completion of benchmark performance testing of Itron Enterprise Edition (IEE) Meter Data Management software on HP Integrity servers and StorageWorks EVA8000 disk arrays.

The conclusion of extensive testing verifies IEE's ability to support the installations of advanced metering systems exceeding 10 million meters.

The benchmark testing was conducted in HP's Marlboro test facility over several months using a realistic data set of 130 million hourly meter readings per day, equivalent to a utility of over 10 million electric and gas meters. The tests were conducted using processing windows and business rules based on Itron's 25 years of experience with the "day-in-the-life" processing of the meter-to-cash workflow.

The results of the testing established:

· That IEE's horizontally scaled architecture enables an incremental build-out of computing resources as the metering network grows, optimizing total cost of ownership without sacrificing long term scalability.
· The successful import, validation and generation of complex time-of-use (TOU) billing exports for five million hourly meters within aggressive processing windows, reaching processing speeds of more than 21,000 readings per second.
· That general purpose computing hardware and infrastructure works without having to use exotic configurations of hardware or software;

"Capturing the full value of meter data systems will require processing massive amounts of data and distributing the information to the right users, at the right time, in the right form," said Philip Mezey, senior vice president for Itron software solutions. "Itron Enterprise Edition has proven it is up to the task of supporting large scale hourly data metering deployments."

"If energy companies are to gain the most value from advanced metering initiatives, they need a proven, large-scale meter data management solution," said Bill Lewis, director, Global Utilities Industries, HP. "Itron's IEE product benchmark testing results prove HP Integrity servers have the scalability and flexible capacity needed to meet long-term enterprise metering requirements."

"HP has been a strong partner and we are expecting even better results of the hardware/software solution with the new HP Integrity systems based on the Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor. This has been a very successful venture for us," said Mezey.