Landis+Gyr Optimizes TCO with Tessell on GCP as its Digital Backbone for smart metering applications

The Company

Landis+Gyr is a global leader in energy management solutions, specializing in smart metering systems, grid edge intelligence, and advanced infrastructure services for utilities. Headquartered in Switzerland, the company operates in over 30 countries, serving electric, gas, and water utilities worldwide. With a focus on innovation, Landis+Gyr helps utilities enhance energy efficiency, optimize grid performance, and reduce environmental impact. As a key player in the energy sector, the company is driving the transition toward a more sustainable future.

The Challenge

In its Global Energy Perspective, McKinsey projects that global energy demand will grow by 11–18% between 2024 and 2050. As a leader in smart metering, Landis+Gyr is at the forefront of this shift toward smarter energy management solutions. However, managing real-time data analytics and monitoring millions of smart meters worldwide poses a unique challenge. Rising energy consumption and the growing need for better grid intelligence required Landis+Gyr to rapidly scale its infrastructure to meet increasing customer demands. Real-time energy grid visibility provides significant benefits for both utilities and their customers, including:

• Faster Fault Detection & Response: Instant outage and fault detection allow utilities to minimize downtime and restore service quickly.
• Load Balancing & Grid Resilience: Continuous monitoring of power demand and supply helps prevent blackouts and optimize distribution.
• Voltage & Frequency Stability: Automated controls ensure voltage and frequency remain within safe operating limits, reducing the risk of grid failures.

Additionally, real-time visibility enables utilities to expand their business models, offering dynamic, demand-based pricing, critical for the electrification of transportation. Operationally, utilities can improve energy transmission, capacity planning, and capital investment strategies. However, in order to achieve this business transformation, Landis+Gyr’s cloud migration efforts faced a critical roadblock:

• Oracle database workload migration was a priority due to scalability needs.
• But without Oracle PaaS automation on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), migration was not feasible.

Legacy Infrastructure Limitations

Landis+Gyr’s smart metering application relied on Head End System (HES) and Meter Data Management (MDM) solutions, running on Windows-based, on-premises infrastructure with Oracle databases. This architecture presented several challenges:

• Performance Bottlenecks: Application latency issues affected real-time data processing.
• Scalability Constraints: Rising data volumes increased infrastructure costs and made expansion difficult.
• High Maintenance Costs: Windows licensing and infrastructure management led to rising operational expenses.

To overcome these limitations, Landis+Gyr decided to migrate its Oracle database and compute workloads to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This migration included a cross-platform transition from Windows to Linux for better performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.

Technical Drivers

Landis+Gyr's migration needed to meet strict technical acceptance criteria, including:

• Low-latency data ingestion and real-time analytics to support smart meter data ingestion.
• High availability and application uptime for critical grid intelligence and customer-facing solutions.
• Cross-platform migration of Oracle database workloads, transitioning from a Windows-based system to a Linux-based environment for better performance, scalability, and reduced costs.
• Scalable infrastructure to handle millions of smart meters without performance degradation.

Assessment and Proof of Value

Tessell started by mapping Landis+Gyr’s current-state architecture, identifying key Oracle applications running on Windows-based servers with Oracle Databases. The HES and MDM systems were the primary IT estate asset focus, which processed vast amounts of telemetry and analytic data from millions of smart meters.

Tessell proposed a comprehensive future-state solution to migrate the Oracle database workloads to GCP, taking into account the need for both cross-platform migration from Windows to Linux and the cloud architecture overhaul.

Tessell led a series of technical future-state deep dives with Landis+Gyr across areas like database architecture, security, data flows, and cloud integration. Tessell’s platform provided a PaaS solution for optimizing day 2+ database lifecycle operations, focused on minimizing costs and improving performance.

As part of the solution, Tessell used a proof-of-concept (PoC) to simulate workloads on GCP, enabling Landis+Gyr to validate key performance metrics like uptime, throughput, and data ingestion latency. This PoC demonstrated that a cross-platform migration could deliver the expected results—real-time data processing, high availability, and scalability—while migrating workloads from Windows to Linux.

The Solution

Tessell enabled Landis+Gyr to:

• Achieve Seamless Cross-Platform Migration: Tessell facilitated the migration of Oracle workloads from Windows to Linux, enabling significant performance improvements. By shifting to a Linux-based system, Landis+Gyr reduced licensing costs, all while maintaining application compatibility.
• Optimize Real-World Performance: A PoC on GCP demonstrated that Oracle HES and MDM workloads could run on Linux with sub-second data ingestion latency and high throughput. This was a critical requirement for Landis+Gyr's real-time smart metering application.
• Increase Scalability: By leveraging GCP’s elastic infrastructure, Landis+Gyr was able to scale its operations effortlessly, handling increased data volumes from millions of smart meters. GCP’s flexible resources allowed the company to scale dynamically, ensuring that performance remained optimal even during peak demand periods.
• Improve Efficiency Through Linux Migration: The migration to Linux enhanced infrastructure efficiency, resolving bottlenecks in CPU utilization and memory management. By reducing overhead associated with Windows-based licensing and management, Landis+Gyr improved operational efficiency and reduced infrastructure costs.
• Meet Data Residency Requirements: GCP’s global data center network provided Landis+Gyr with the flexibility to meet regulatory data residency requirements, ensuring compliance as the company expanded its operations into new markets.

The Results and Business Impact

The migration to GCP and the cross-platform shift from Windows to Linux delivered significant business benefits for Landis+Gyr:

• Improved Application Availability: With GCP, Landis+Gyr achieved over 99.99% application availability. Migration to Linux resolved performance bottlenecks that were previously caused by Windows servers, such as oversubscribed CPUs, which led to intermittent data-ingestion latency and application crashes.
• Enhanced Performance and Reduced Latency: The Linux-based GCP environment improved data-processing efficiency, reducing data ingestion latency to below one second. Landis+Gyr could now process and analyze smart meter data in real-time, providing critical insights to utilities.
• Operational Efficiency Gains: The migration allowed Landis+Gyr to automate patching and updates, saving time and reducing manual intervention. This freed up IT resources for more strategic initiatives, including data analytics and customer engagement.
• TCO Savings and Cost Optimization:
  
  • 50% reduction in infrastructure costs by transitioning to GCP and migrating workloads from Windows to Linux, which also eliminated licensing fees associated with Windows.
  • 60% improvement in time and labor savings for DBAs, who now focus on value-added tasks like leveraging data insights and expanding to new markets.
  • Reduced Oracle support costs and additional savings from the efficient use of Linux-based infrastructure.
  • Infrastructure savings from GCP’s pay-as-you-go model and optimized resource usage, including reserved instances for long-term compute needs.

FinOps Savings

• TCO Savings: Tessell’s migration solution resulted in a 50% reduction in infrastructure estate and a 60% improvement in time and labor efficiency, enabling Landis+Gyr to optimize costs while meeting scalability and performance goals.
• License and Support Cost Reductions: Moving from Windows to Linux eliminated the need for Windows licenses and further reduced ongoing support expenses.
• On-Time Data Center Exit: Landis+Gyr is on track to exit from its on-premises data centers as planned, realizing significant infrastructure savings while adopting a flexible, scalable cloud model.

Future Roadmap: Leveraging High Availability & Disaster Recovery for Business Continuity

As Landis+Gyr continues to scale its smart metering infrastructure and expand its global footprint, maintaining high availability (HA) and robust disaster recovery (DR) capabilities becomes increasingly critical.

Tessell DBaaS on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) will play a key role in supporting Landis+Gyr’s future operations. The company plans to enhance its database infrastructure by leveraging Tessell’s built-in HA and DR features to safeguard against disruptions and ensure continuous service.

Key Future Initiatives

• Advanced High Availability Architecture: Tessell will enable Landis+Gyr to deploy a multi-zone and multi-region solution across GCP, ensuring 99.99% uptime and robust failover mechanisms in case of system failures.
• Disaster Recovery Strategy: With geographically distributed backups and automated cross-region failover processes, Landis+Gyr will be able to quickly recover critical applications, reducing potential downtime and ensuring minimal data loss.
• Business Continuity & Regulatory Compliance: By meeting industry standards for disaster recovery and compliance, Landis+Gyr ensures uninterrupted service while adhering to regional regulations.

By leveraging Tessell’s expertise in both cross-platform migration and cloud transformation, Landis+Gyr modernized its infrastructure, improved real-time data processing, and laid the foundation for continued growth in the smart metering sector. The migration to GCP with Tessell not only optimized their technology stack but also Landis+Gyr’s operational costs, thus enabling profitable global expansion.