Headquartered in Glastonbury, Connecticut, Mitsubishi Power Aero is a global leader in fast-track, on-demand power solutions, specializing in advanced aero-derivative gas turbine packages. Engineered with advanced technology inspired by aircraft engines, these turbines are compact, lightweight and modular, providing a source of supplemental or primary electricity to municipalities, independent power producers and more. Committed to innovation and efficiency, Mitsubishi Power Aero delivers these highly customized solutions to meet diverse customer needs, offering rapid deployment, exceptional performance and versatility. Through its innovative and customer-centric approach, Mitsubishi Power Aero leads the way in providing energy security to a global market.
At-a-Glance
To enhance and scale deployments of its aero-derivative gas turbine packages, Mitsubishi Power Aero developed a standardized and secure remote monitoring solution. Built on Kubernetes using SUSE Edge Suite, this innovative solution serves as the foundation for building customized tooling that seamlessly adapts to diverse customer environments. The solution also delivers significant cost savings and data-driven insights to both Mitsubishi Power Aero and its customers.
Strained budgets, data capacity and performance
As global electricity demand surges, the power generation industry faces growing complexity. Where some areas have increased regulations, others have faced deregulation. In places reliant on renewable energy, peak energy demands strain networks deficient of constant, stable power. However, regardless of a customer’s circumstances, Mitsubishi Power Aero’s aero-derivative gas turbine packages provide a business-critical solution — offering both supplemental and primary energy when it matters most.
For the Remote Monitoring and Diagnostic Reporting (RM&DR) team, delivering optimal performance and reliable support is mission-critical. Historically, the RM&DR team achieved these goals using standard Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.
While effective for managing individual sites, SCADA systems hindered global growth. Their high licensing costs strained budgets as operations grew, and their data capacity and performance were limited to handling only hundreds of data points per engine. These restrictions prevented Mitsubishi Power Aero’s RM&DR team from recording additional data, such as power plant commands and system states, that would enable the company to further optimize aero-derivative gas turbine performance and reliability.
Diverse infrastructure across customer sites also complicated deployments, requiring unique configurations for varying hardware, internet connectivity and security needs, which were critical concerns. Stringent regulations and heightened cyber risks demand self-reliant, air-gapped solutions that ensure secure data communication. Furthermore, intermittent internet access and high-latency conditions at remote sites hinder real-time monitoring and analysis, making it difficult to detect and respond to security incidents promptly.
To overcome these challenges, Mitsubishi Power Aero set out to transform its operational infrastructure, looking for technologies to replace traditional SCADA systems with a scalable, cloud native solution. By embracing a Kubernetes-based approach, the company aimed to pave the way for greater agility, efficiency and innovation. With this shift, Mitsubishi Power Aero hoped to fully capitalize on cloud native technologies and reinforce its leadership in the power generation industry.
“There’s really no other company out there the size and legitimacy of SUSE that provides a software package like this. Competitors provide some self-hosting capabilities of cloud infrastructure, but it’s at a different scale and a very different price point.”
Why SUSE Edge?
Mitsubishi Power Aero’s primary objective was to scale, secure and standardize the deployment of a cloud native RM&DR system on its aero-derivative gas turbine packages. Managing diverse customer environments presented significant challenges, particularly with unique hardware, security and connectivity requirements across locations. Committed to adopting Kubernetes, Mitsubishi Power Aero needed a solution that could simplify managing its cloud native estate. After evaluating many solutions, the company selected SUSE Edge Suite, a solution stack for edge deployments that includes SUSE Rancher Prime infrastructure management, SUSE Linux Micro lightweight OS, SUSE Storage cloud native storage and SUSE RKE2 secure lightweight Kubernetes.
SUSE’s offering enabled the creation of a unified platform for managing remote sites, particularly those with high data-sampling demands. This standardized approach would improve data acquisition processes while maintaining consistent quality across customer environments. Additionally, the self-hosted nature of SUSE’s stack provided full control over systems and data, addressing stringent security, compliance and privacy requirements crucial for handling sensitive power generation data.
The Kubernetes-based infrastructure, combining RKE2 and SUSE Linux Micro as the operating system, runs entirely on self-hosted systems and provides a stable and secure foundation deployable on virtually any hardware. This flexibility ensures that Mitsubishi Power Aero can support diverse client needs without incurring significant additional costs.
To ensure interoperability and uphold open source principles, the company needed a platform that could easily adapt this plug-in solution to varied environments. Committed to open source ethos, SUSE Edge Suite provides additional agility by enabling these edge servers to adapt to diverse customer hardware requirements. This guarantees seamless integration regardless of a customer's existing infrastructure.
RKE2, a batteries-included Kubernetes engine, provides an easy-to-deploy infrastructure, allowing the team to focus on application and tooling development rather than managing the underlying infrastructure. Meanwhile, the virtualization capabilities of SUSE Linux Micro enable Mitsubishi Power Aero to integrate components like firewalls directly into its system, reducing hardware costs and simplifying deployments. Max Holschuh, RM&DR manager at Mitsubishi Power Aero, elaborates: “We used to deploy separate firewalls and separate pieces of hardware. Now, these are virtualized within SUSE Linux Micro.”
Using tools like Canal CNI and Multus for direct networking, the company developed custom tools to acquire data from power plant systems. This custom tool processes and standardizes high-frequency data and allows the RM&DR team to gather thousands of data points, as opposed to hundreds with the SCADA systems. However, transitioning from traditional SCADA systems to a modern Linux containerized environment required robust storage and network support. This is why Mitsubishi Power Aero leveraged SUSE Storage to extend the platform and simplify edge storage management, offering stability, high availability, replication and encryption — ideal for smaller-scale deployments, industrial controllers and IoT gateways.
Lastly, Rancher Prime provides a single pane of glass for managing the entire infrastructure, allowing Mitsubishi Power Aero to ensure consistency, simplify monitoring and reduce manual intervention.
By implementing SUSE solutions, Mitsubishi Power Aero reduced deployment complexity and increased security to meet evolving customer needs, even in the most remote and sensitive regions. The company is not only adapting to the evolving demands of the power generation industry but also establishing itself as a driver for innovation and transformative change within the sector. Choosing SUSE as the technological foundation for the company’s global scalability, Mitsubishi Power Aero can deliver operational excellence, innovate new solutions and be future-ready.
Holschuh says: “There’s really no other company out there the size and legitimacy of SUSE that provides a software package like this. Competitors provide some self-hosting capabilities of cloud infrastructure, but it’s at a different scale and a very different price point.”
Saving costs, accelerating growth and improving monitoring capabilities
Doubled deployments
By implementing SUSE Edge, Mitsubishi Power Aero has standardized and streamlined the infrastructure that its RM&DR team deploys at customer sites. This standardization has enabled the company to double its number of deployed sites in just six months, all with the same core team of engineers.
“Within months of implementing SUSE Edge, we were able to double our sites because our solution is easier to deploy,” says Holschuh. “Thanks to SUSE, we now have a much more scalable product that’s compatible with a wider range of customer environments — even those with limited internet connectivity that couldn’t support our previous requirements.”
Improved deployment time from months to days
After implementing SUSE Edge, the RM&DR team drastically reduced deployment times, cutting the process from several months to just one to two days — sometimes even as little as one hour with near-zero-touch deployment. This represents a deployment time reduction of approximately 98%, significantly increasing the company’s ability to serve its customers.
Deployments have become so simple that even non-IT professionals can set up connections in as little as one hour. Holschuh illustrates: “We recently completed our fastest deployment overseas. It was just me on a Zoom call with one of the plant operators for about an hour, and we got it connected. He’s not an IT professional who does this for a living — he’s a plant operator. This really shows how easy it is for us to deploy the new SUSE Linux Micro-based setup, especially compared to our previous process.”
Providing customer value
Developing its own data acquisition system using SUSE Storage, the RM&DR team eliminated the need for costly SCADA system licensing. By eliminating these licensing fees, Mitsubishi Power Aero is able to invest the savings in better enterprise-grade edge server equipment deployed at customer sites. This equipment offers improved resilience, reliability, security, as well as future expandability for RM&DR service offerings at the edge such as AI workloads. Additionally, the new streamlined deployment process and reduced maintenance requirements of the SUSE-based solution further contributed to overall cost efficiency.
From hundreds to thousands of data points
Using SUSE Linux Micro and RKE2, Mitsubishi Power Aero developed a self-reliant, isolated cloud environment within power plant networks. This infrastructure, leveraging Rancher and Fleet for continuous delivery, enables low-latency data acquisition and management, allowing the RM&DR team to gather and process thousands of data points from customer sites.
These data points, including power plant commands, system states and environmental conditions, are standardized to optimize the performance, reliability and efficiency of the company’s aero-derivative gas turbine packages. This significantly outperforms the previous SCADA systems, which could only handle hundreds of data points, and also captures previously inaccessible data, providing deeper insights and enhanced monitoring.
“Thanks to SUSE LInux Micro and RKE2, we’re able to gather a lot more data than before,” says Holschuh. “Not only is the system more performant, but we’ve built our own tooling on this standardized cloud infrastructure. The SCADA system we used to use could only handle a few hundred data points at a time. Now, we’re pulling in thousands.”
What’s next for Mitsubishi Power Aero?
Looking ahead, Mitsubishi Power Aero is focused on maximizing the capabilities of the SUSE Edge by further deploying SUSE Security, Fleet (a component of Rancher Prime) and GitOps tools. According to Holschuh, the current solution stack offers immense opportunities for growth and optimization, providing a strong foundation for scaling and unlocking the full potential of Mitsubishi Power Aero’s self-hosted platform.
“We haven’t yet reached any kind of plateau; but it’s been great so far,” says Holschuh. “SUSE solutions have allowed us to expand capabilities rapidly, and we have a growing fleet of installed products that will continue to fuel our further product development efforts within this platform.”