Doing a Double-Take: SCADA replication software refines Carlsberg plant operations
At the Leeds, U.K. brewing & bottling plant of Danish brewing group Carlsberg, an asynchronous fail-over and replication solution from Double-Take Software is keeping production going when server failures take critical systems off-line.
Brewing three million hectoliters of beer each year—including the company’s popular British brand, Tetley’s—and operating 24 hours a day, server failure used to hit production hard.
Over the last five years, explains Senior Systems Engineer Graeme Walker, server failure has knocked out the brewery’s SCADA system twice. On each occasion, he relates, it has taken IT engineers between two and four hours to replace the hardware and reinstate the system. And with its SCADA systems inactive, brewing operations would grind to a halt—with a four-hour interruption to brewing the equivalent of a loss in production of approximately 190,000 liters of beer.
In mid-2007, explains Walker, the decision was made to upgrade the plant’s Intellution SCADA to a more current version—now sold and supported under the GE Proficy banner. But while this contained an improved fail-over capability, the extent of the data replication wasn’t total. Recognizing that the upgrade would require new servers, Carlsberg began to explore other options.