Case Study: Axpo achieves scalable 150M-row daily IoT ingestion and fast analytics with Timescale

Axpo ingests 150 million rows a day with Timescale

Axpo, Switzerland's largest power producer, faced significant challenges with its IoT platform for monitoring power plants. Their initial system, built on Microsoft SQL Server, could not handle the high-volume ingest of sensor data and crashed after connecting just two plants. After migrating to a managed TimescaleDB service on Azure, they solved the ingest problem but hit a new storage ceiling, as adding more disk space required upgrading to a larger, more expensive compute tier they did not need.

Timescale solved this by migrating Axpo to Tiger Cloud on AWS, which provided independent, tiered storage that could grow separately from compute. This allowed Axpo to continue ingesting 150 million time-series rows daily from over 20 power plants while cost-effectively retaining over a decade of queryable data. The results included sub-second query times for operators, smooth visualization over years of data, and a simplified architecture that scales seamlessly as more plants are connected.

Axpo