Announcing Canvas, a production ready OpenADR VTN

Canvas fills the gap by providing a scalable and flexible OpenADR VTN

2 minute read ∙ Aug 8th, 2017

We are excited to introduce Canvas, an OpenADR VTN server. Canvas comes in two flavors:

• a SaaS solution for the purposes of getting up to speed quickly
• a licensed software solution that can be hosted on premise or with other cloud infrastructure for full scale deployments

Canvas load shifting events, device registrations, and other functionality can be configured and viewed manually through a browser based UI or programmatically through API integrations. Typically, companies will start by quickly getting up to speed through the UI and SaaS solution, then move to the hosted software version as their scale and integration requirements require it.

Why Canvas?

With more and more OpenADR compliant devices becoming available, the appeal of using an OpenADR VTN in a load shifting program to communicate with them is only increasing. Many aggregators and utilities that are running programs, or have plans to, would benefit significantly from running an OpenADR VTN. Our goal with this product is to make OpenADR as ubiquitous and useful as possible.

We see a gap in the market. There are some open source solutions out there, most noteably by EPRI (originally written by the GridFabric team, but not since updated), but they still require work and OpenADR expertise to integrate. There are also heavy duty, established solutions, most significantly from Honeywell, but these are also becoming outdated and are too inflexible and expensive to get up and running quickly.

This solution offers a fully featured VTN that can be deployed quickly in a SaaS environment for pilot or testing purposes, and transitioned to a hosted solution for full scale deployments. This will covers customer requirements for a secure and scalable VTN without causing significant overhead unnecessarily.

Key features

Reliability and High Availability

Canvas can install and scale like any other web application, since it is delivered over http. Canvas can handle communications with thousands of VENs.

Flexible deployment

Canvas provides the option of getting up and running quickly through our SaaS solution, or providing maximal configuration and control through our licensed software solution.

Another facet of flexibility is how the VTN is managed. Canvas can be controlled and configured through the web browser based UI, requiring no software integration capabilities.

Compliance tested

We will use our automated instance of the official test harness to integrate running the compliance tests with our release process, and guarantee that Canvas passes all compliance tests, now and in all future releases.

Commercials

Canvas is offered for a yearly fee that scales depending on the scale of the deployment and technical requirements. Please contact us to discuss your particular project needs.