Unlike what happens in the IT field, where data is considered secure when the three criteria of Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability are met, in order, in the industrial environment the order is reversed and the first indispensable characteristic is availability: in fact, an industrial system must first of all be "turned on", always and in any case.
If the high availability it is important in almost all manufacturing activities, in the most critical applications, the availability of the system must be fault tolerant, i.e. able to remain standing in the event of a failure of one of its components.
One way to achieve this result is to use redundant systems (at least 2 active in parallel) to ensure operational continuity and minimize restart times in the event of a failure.
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The role of virtualization
However, it is not always easy to achieve high levels of availability, which in some cases must even exceed the 99,9%. This is where virtualization technologies come into play, already well known in the IT field, but so far not widespread in the manufacturing field due to the typical hardware-centric bias prevailing among production technicians.
One of the main companies in the world that has invested resources in this direction is Stratus, a US company headquartered in Massachusetts.
Her solution everRun it allows you to quickly – and at reasonable cost – achieve the necessary levels of business continuity, where and when you need them.
everRun allows you to protect critical applications, networks, data and operating systems from service interruptions, errors or outages and from accidents.
It allows, in fact, to reach a level of availability in all factory applications and infrastructures that can reach Present in several = 99,999%, thus offering companies a significant advantage in terms of cost reduction and increased productivity.
HOW MUCH DOES EACH HOUR OF DOWNTIME COST YOU?
Using everRun can be created servers on different hardware, with the software to guarantee the perfect synchronization of the resources and the immediate start of the backup resource in case of failure of the primary resource.
It is not necessary that the servers where the supervision and control applications actually run are physically close: the software combines the physical resources of two standard Windows servers in a single operating environment, with complete redundancy of hardware and data components.
And physical servers can be located miles away if supported by the right network infrastructure.
This is an incredibly important "plus" because it allows you to take advantage of flexible architectures. Furthermore, using server-based software, image-copies of the server can also be used to carry out tests and/or restarts.
Not to be overlooked, as the last added value, is the fact that Stratus everRun solutions are practically ready to use and require minimal IT support intervention.
SOFTWARE SOLUTION
HARDWARE+SOFTWARE SOLUTION