Systems Integrator Controlco Now Offering Hosting Services to the Building Automation Industry

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Investment in database infrastructure addresses unique industry needs

OAKLAND, April 7, 2014 – Oakland-based distributor and building systems integrator Controlco announced today that it will offer hosting services to address building automation industry needs. While big data and the interconnectivity of the Internet of Things proliferate at unbelievable rates, the need for fast, reliable and redundant servers is ever-increasing. There are plenty of standard business options for datacenter storage and server space, but Controlco, after spending five years customizing traditional data center storage packages, has invested in the infrastructure to supply the real-time control that they and other energy and building managers need.

“These are not your typical databases built on sequel tables and rows,” Controlco President Brian Turner said, “these are time-series databases. While relational databases are proven at handling large data sets, the energy management analytics tools in the market today need to access historical and near-real-time data at speeds not often seen in the business analytics tools used on those databases.

“Our databases are able access thousands of rows of historical data, and compare it to near-real-time data to make intelligent decisions and take action. This occurs several times per minute in the typical building portfolio and this capability is crucial to empower automated energy demand management.”

Controlco has invested in all of the software and hardware infrastructure and is leasing cabinet and cooling space from datacenter solutions provider Digital Realty. To make the data available on the cloud, Controlco worked with the managed services firm Ontai and cloud storage manufacturer X-IO Technologies.

“The building automation industry has unique database needs,” said Donough Roche, VP of Engineering at Digital Realty. “We worked very closely with Controlco to make sure that the solutions we provided are agile and scalable enough to fully work within their framework growth.”

General Growth properties, the real estate investment company specializing in shopping malls which has recently implemented a BAS integration with Controlco, decided to use the company's hosting service after they experienced complications with an in-house server on a smaller project many years ago.

“We had done a minor project several years earlier and we had that server in-house,” Jeff Nash, senior director of energy management for GGP, explained. “We owned and built that server and it was really an alien within our network architecture. It created lots of issues for our technical team to maintain. So going into this full portfolio integration, we made the decision to have Controlco host the server.”

“We've built this infrastructure on many years of experience within the hosted server space,” Controlco's Turner said, “and now we're making that experience available to customers so they can take advantage of real-time, historical and cloud-ready data without having to learn all the lessons the hard way.”

Space is now available for other building automation clients to lease from Controlco. For further information, contact Natalie Jacobs at n.jacobs@controlco.com.