We at E-Merge Systems provide systems integration in industrial automation for a variety of clients, from pharmaceuticals to water treatment. Our company was founded over 20 years ago and has grown to over 25 engineers based in five offices across three states. Our engineers have in-depth knowledge of industrial automation, from panel design, documenting functional description specifications, designing and developing SCADA control and programming tools, planning and configuring industrial IT infrastructure, to on-site commissioning.
New water SCADA systems and new requirements
E-Merge Systems has been tasked with updating the
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system for a municipal
customer. The client has a Wastewater Treatment Plant (ETA) and a Wastewater
Collection System (WCS). These systems track and control the logistic transfer
of wastewater to municipal wastewater treatment plants and the treatment
process at ETA.
The plant's SCADA and acquisition systems are housed in the
ETA and controlled from the control room at the plant. Municipal officials also
gain remote access to SCADA systems to monitor collection and processing
processes. The legacy system consisted of several stand-alone Windows servers
for SCADA, remote desktop, and archiving services on both systems.
The system update introduces several new requirements for
reliability and fault tolerance. The SCADA software package that the district
uses recommends having multiple servers that are synchronized together in an
active / standby configuration for mission-critical systems. This configuration
provides a level of software redundancy, but is often difficult to configure
and manage. The utilities department also wanted to be able to easily manage
the IT infrastructure on their own.
Finding a reliable solution and reducing complexity
Stratus ftServer's E-Merge solution proved to be an
excellent choice for the customer. FtServer does not require special training
or experience to keep the system up and running, reducing the need for
dedicated IT resources to manage SCADA services.
The hardware resiliency provided by ftServer not only
increases system redundancy and uptime, but also reduces the overall footprint
of its SCADA architecture. With ftServer and a failover automation layer,
vendor software redundancy can be replaced with hardware failover during
blocking phases. This concentrated the overall complexity of the system, made
troubleshooting easier, and minimized the software cost associated with using
multiple servers and software packages.
Thanks to the reliability that Stratus offers, the
municipality was able to integrate remote desktop and archiving services
between plant and collection systems. This not only reduced the number of virtual
machines and the associated license costs, but also reduced the total number of
servers that needed to be managed, further reducing the allocated IT resources
required by the municipality.
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