3TIER, an industry leading company dealing in renewables risk management, helps businesses decide where to place their wind-farms, solar-farms and hydro-dams by giving them all the information they need to assess the future energy potential of any location. How do they do this? Big data.

1. THE REAL BIG DATA: CASE STUDY
One in a series of four
Predicting
the storm
How Big Data Helped 3TIER’s
Renewables Risk Management

2. THE REAL BIG DATA: CASE STUDY
3TIER is an industry leader in renewable information, It creates detailed assessments of the future renewable It’s a pioneer in the renewable energy market,
helping organisations understand and manage the risks energy potential of any location, utilising the expertise providing cutting-edge wind and solar generation risk
associated with renewable energy projects like wind of its meteorologists, engineers and data scientists, analysis, using science and technology to frame the
and solar farms. while combining up-to-date weather data with historical risk of weather-driven variability anywhere on Earth.
weather patterns.
Predicting the storm – How Big Data Helped 3TIER’s Renewables Risk Management

3. THE REAL BIG DATA: CASE STUDY
Challenges
Forecasting energy in real-time is crucial for the renewables industry and a key
part of 3TIER’s business model. Accurate predictions are essential, both before
a project goes into development and every day that project is producing
power. If a wind farm developer can give a relatively precise forecast of how
much energy it is able to produce, then it puts it in good stead when selling
to a power utility company.
To achieve this 3TIER offers two main web based services: assessments (using
the skills and knowledge of their experts, plus big data) and forecasts (real-
time data feeds, accompanied by analytics which accurately assess output).
All of the data 3TIER produces needs to be accessible instantly and reliably
online. But there were pre big data plan challenges.
3TIER’s RAID storage array couldn’t This inability to scale complicated
scale to meet the demands of management, escalated costs and
its workflow. limited the company’s ability to grow
its customer base.
Predicting the storm – How Big Data Helped 3TIER’s Renewables Risk Management

4. THE REAL BIG DATA: CASE STUDY
“3TIER ingests massive amounts of weather and climate
data and our in-house numerical weather models create
even more. Transforming all that data into accurate
renewable energy assessments and forecasts is a major
challenge. To focus on what we do best — building
applications to extract insights from the data — we
needed to reduce the burden of data management.”
PAUL ENGLISH, IT DIRECTOR AT 3TIER
3TIER’s cluster is putting out around a terabyte of data a day, that they retain
and keep. Nature supplies an infinite amount of data — the more data 3TIER
can process, the more it can help to provide a sustainable future.
Predicting the storm – How Big Data Helped 3TIER’s Renewables Risk Management

5. THE REAL BIG DATA: CASE STUDY
Solution
To solve its big data dilemma, 3TIER adopted a solution that enabled it to
present significant amounts of data online to customers. It also provided a
scalable storage system with the ability to handle forecasting and assessment
applications on a single, shared resource. 3TIER has improved operating 3TIER’s storage management
and storage efficiency by unifying requirements have reduced, utilising
multiple performance tiers into a a single, simple interface.
single file system. Automated big
data now migrates seamlessly
between the tiers.
3TIER have also made use of a ‘pay 3TIER’s flexible storage option has
as you grow’ architecture, purchasing minimised capital costs, as well
the storage it needs while maintaining as the space, power and cooling
the option to add more as business requirements connected with
requirements change. storage infrastructure.
Predicting the storm – How Big Data Helped 3TIER’s Renewables Risk Management

6. THE REAL BIG DATA: CASE STUDY One in a series of four
“Before EMC Isilon, our team had to do everything from
manual data migrations to mapping directory paths,
which simply wasn’t sustainable for a business growing
as quickly as ours. With Isilon, everything is simple.
We’ve eliminated big data management and storage
headaches, freeing up resources to focus on the services
that deliver real value to our clients.”
PAUL ENGLISH, IT DIRECTOR AT 3TIER