The devastating water event in Flint Michigan, the water
crisis in California, and unforeseen events such as Hurricanes Sandy and
Matthew, which are increasing the population of wastewater/sewage in NJ and NC,
highlight the main problems facing the water and sewage industry. While these
complications lie in the lack of renovation and replacement (R&R) of aging
water and sewage infrastructure and weak funding for capital improvements, unplanned
downtime remains a significant issue in the water industry. Failure of SCADA
control causes several problems, such as:
Inability to control remote locations
Loss of integration with reliability systems
Data loss / reporting
"Blindness" from the factory level to the entire
district
However, upgrading aged water / wastewater control systems
can generate rapid returns and readiness for future applications.
The challenges of traditional water/sewage supervision and
control systems lie in outdated/outdated hardware, operating systems, software,
and personnel. Traditional computer hardware typically has multiple single
points of failure, with the failure rate and support costs increasing
exponentially after five to seven years. Outdated/outdated operating systems
and software often contain cyber security vulnerabilities, are subject to
prolonged downtime, and are difficult and expensive to update. Personnel
challenges include institutional knowledge supported by an obsolete substructure.
The solution to these tests lies in virtualization - which
is a key component to L2/L3 modernization. Implementing virtualization skill to
run on SCADA systems reduces the number of hardware platforms that support
multiple applications. In addition, it offers benefits of cost savings,
operational improvements and increased productivity.
However, while virtualization is widely accepted in the IT
world, OT people within the automation space are not so quick to accept. This
is since, with a traditional architecture, hardware failure in virtualized
systems is catastrophic.
Single Physical Machine = Single Point of Potential
Failure
So how can this be avoided? There are many facilities that
protect virtualized systems, however Stratus provides solutions that are
continuously available, operationally simple and cost-effective. Stratus'
ftServer provides an automated uptime layer and fault detection isolation. Both
tiers of the platform work in absolute sync - still working perfectly if one
tier fails - with no data loss. Stratus also offers 24/7 service support that
includes detailed system health monitoring, dedicated availability specialists
and system monitoring and diagnostics, and much more.
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