Silver Spring Networks (SSN)

Silver Spring Networks (SSN) helps global utilities and cities connect, optimize, and manage smart energy and smart city infrastructure. It provides smart grid products and also develops software for utilities and customers to improve their energy efficiency. SSN is one of the world's largest IOT companies, receiving data from over 22 million smart meters and connected devices, reading over 200 billion records per year, and conducting over two million remote operations per year.

As SSN's network and volume, variety, and velocity of data began to grow, it started to ponder:

• How to obtain more value out of its network of connected devices
• How to manage the growing number of devices, access their data, and ensure the safety of their data
• How to integrate with third party data applications quickly

SSN's answer to these questions would be informed by its needs, which included:

• A broad variety of incoming data, including sensor data, meter data, interval data, device metadata, threshold events, and traps
• Multi-tenancy and shared resources to save costs, with centralized management of software and applications
• Security, including encryption of both data-at-rest and data-in-motion, auditing of data, and no loss of data across tenants
• Ability to scale, based on the millions of connected devices in its network, as well as over eight billion events per day and volume of over 500 GB each day
• High availability and disaster recoverability of its cluster, with automated failovers as well as rolling upgrades

SSN chose Apex as its solution due to the following factors:

• The availability of pre-existing and prebuilt operators as part of the Apex Malhar library
• The ability to develop applications quickly
• Apex's operability and auto-scaling capabilities
• Apex's partitioning capabilities, leading to scalability
• Java programmers are able to learn Apex application development quickly
• Operations are handled by Apex and don't require hands on management

In addition to meeting SSN's requirements, Apex was able to make SSN data accessible to applications without delay to improve customer service and was able to capture and analyze historical data to understand and improve grid operations.

Additional Resources

• Video: Silver Spring Networks presents Utilities & Smart Meter IOT with Apex -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98EW5NGM3u0
• Slides: Silver Spring Networks presents IOT Big Data Ingestion and Processing with Apex - http://www.slideshare.net/ApacheApex/iot-big-data-ingestion-and-processing-in-hadoop-by-silver-spring-networks