Products

Advanced Fault Tolerant Solution

Our Advanced Fault Tolerant Solution is a set of tools that we use to create loosely coupled redundant computer systems which routinely provide between 5.5 and 6 levels of 9 ( 99.9995% to 99.9999%) uptime. This translates to between than 157 seconds (a bit over 2.5 minutes) and 31 seconds of downtime per year. This includes planned and unplanned downtime. Unplanned downtime occurs when systems crash because of either software or hardware issues.Planned downtime is that time when a software installation requires a restart of the computer or a hardware upgrade of the system is needed.

Our system uses two separate (possibly non-homogeneous) computers that communicate with our Failover Controller. This controller does all of the system health monitoring and master/slave arbitration. A physical 100mb Ethernet switch insures that only one of the computers communicates with the plant network at a time, absolutely preventing a redundant system nightmare where both computers think they're the primary and attempt to control the field equipment simultaneously. This controller will also control switching of our Smart Serial Switch cards to likewise insure that only the master system communicates with the serial devices in the system.

Software running in the two systems does the health checking of the individual processes and makes determinations as to whether to notify operators of a program failure, automatically restart the program, or force a fail-over to the other system.

This solution handles hardware and software failures, while maintaining redundant copies of critical data to prevent data loss. Critical data files are cloned between the systems using an off the shelf product.

This solution will allow you to completely maintain and update your control system without significant downtime. We call this process "Spiral Development" and you can see our audio/visual white paper on it at [Link to White Papers/Spiral Development.pps].

Call us at 866-282-4487 for pricing.

Universal OPC-to-Legacy Solution

Our Universal OPC-to-Legacy Solution is an OPC Server that allows for any number of configurable communications protocols over either serial or TCP/IP. A separate program defines the protocols and then the driver implements the protocols on an individual serial line basis. Each protocol can be initiated either by the central computer or from the field device. This driver allows legacy protocols to be implemented in much shorter times and at much less cost than via programming. Data from the protocol is available to the system as OLE for Process Control (OPC) data.

Price - $920 per system. Protocol definitions are developed on a time/material basis, but generally cost less than $2000.

Smart Serial Switch

Our Smart Serial Switches are microprocessor driven A/B switches for RS-232 serial on steroids. These switches will automatically seek the communicating system and connect it to the field. Because the data is read from the computer and then written to the field and vice versa, the microprocessor can be programmed to make whatever changes to the data that is necessary. This allows data from hard real-time multidrop communications devices to be interfaced with a non-real-time Microsoft Windows system without any loss of data. Port Selection can be automatic or manual or controlled by the Advanced Fault Tolerant Solution Failover Controller to coordinate redundant communications to serial equipment.

This system is packaged as a 19" rack-mountable card cage and hot swappable cards for each channel.

Price: Rack - $814
Dual Port Card - $662
Customization of the firmware is done on a Time and Materials basis.

NTCIP to OPC driver

Our Patent Pending NTCIP to OPC driver allows for modern communications to traffic control devices to be done directly from commercial off the shelf SCADA packages that utilize the OLE for Process Control (OPC) data standard. All modern SCADA systems use OPC for their data because it maintains components of the data like data quality and the time the data was gathered with the data so programs can know exactly how valid the data is. Communications through the NTCIP to OPC driver can be via serial devices or via TCP/IP. A built-in MIB compiler insures that any NTCIP compliant device can be controlled through this driver.

Call us at 866-282-4487 for pricing.