Even More Virtually Certain Than Last Time!

The level of interest in our last article about virtualisation was high and so, back by popular demand, Director John Bilyj returns to the blog this week to give a practical example of how the technology can work in an active business environment.

Ripon Select Foods is a large manufacturing operation in (you guessed it) Ripon, North Yorkshire, and their processing lines are monitored at many points with weighers which measure the flow of raw materials in and finished product out. The weighers are all connected to Atlas systems, distributed throughout the plant which take the weights and, as well as providing visibility for operatives of how lines are performing, feed the figures back regularly to the main system, which runs the Atlas ‘BarRed’ application, providing them with complete and live capacity & performance analysis of the whole plant.

The issue was that the 6 distributed systems are all slightly different, as different weighers throughout the plant provide their own, usually unique, interface for taking readings, so each system has its own unique combination of interfaces.

The mission was to provide backup in case of the failure of any of these individual systems. Atlas came up with a solution which provides a single machine with 6 VMs, each with an exact image of one of the systems out in the works. In case of the failure of any of these, rather than the machine being disconnected for a time whilst being repaired or replaced, and the attendant loss of vital production information, the PC with the virtual machines is connected in its place and the VM configured for that system is started and production monitoring is continued with minimal loss of information. The fact that one PC covers all the systems out in the works made the project a viable and valuable business backup solution.

If you have a similar requirement that lends itself to virtualisation, or indeed have production monitoring requirements of your own that Atlas could help you with, please contact your friendly Atlas consultant on 0333 666 3330 and discuss this mission-critical component with him / her.