Industrial automation technology is aging, leaving manufacturers at greater risk of unplanned downtime than ever before. The cost of downtime is growing exponentially and, with ever increasing competition, many UK manufacturers are being constrained by out-dated processes and applications. It is now essential for manufacturers to ensure they maximise their assets and applications to achieve their business goals.
Automated control systems are vital for UK plants and manufacturing facilities, but many of these systems are ageing and becoming unreliable. Manufacturing equipment is known for having long lifecycles, but as the sector has changed so have the demands upon it. The emergence of industry 4.0 has demanded that automation and IT come together in new ways, promising new benefits but also exposing antiquated systems.
In a sector of squeezed margins, the prospect of widespread systems upgrades is not a palatable one. However, the potential cost of ‘making do’ has never been higher. In the manufacturing industry, profitability depends on your ability to keep your plant infrastructure up and running at all times; downtime in SCADA, HMI, Historians and other critical industrial automation systems can mean lower yields, lost revenue, regulatory fines, compromised quality, or a damaged reputation. To maximise productivity and quality you need operationally simple continuous availability and visibility.
Despite this, many manufacturers are running on operating systems so old that they are no longer supported by the vendor, meaning they’re not upgraded and maintained and, should anything go wrong, there’s nothing that can be done. We recently worked with a chemical manufacturer who was using Windows Server 2003 – a 14-year-old operating system! As well as leaving the business exposed to downtime and security threats, there was also the issue that the operating system pre-dated most of the engineers working with it. Their tech savvy generation didn’t remember it or speak its language and were therefore unable to maintain it.
The reliability of operational technology and the systems supporting it is critical. The challenges currently facing UK manufacturers have never been greater, with increasing price pressure, rising production energy costs and constantly changing regulations all having an impact. Each of these issues directly affects operational expenditure, so continuous visibility into the operation of critical systems is vital. And, with the average cost of downtime for UK manufacturers using legacy systems standing at just over £70k per hour*, the price of supporting the status quo is arguably too high.
So what’s the answer for manufacturers who can’t afford a complete hardware upgrade but still require a flexible solution that enables them to bridge the technology gap whilst preserving their best hardware?
In mainstream IT, virtualisation has become the norm, but it also has a lot to offer to industrial IT environments, such as its ability to support manufacturers in maximising the life of their existing systems so that they can achieve the lowest Total Cost of Ownership.
Traditionally, the operating system and its applications were tightly intertwined with the physical hardware they were installed upon. Virtualisation breaks this link by allowing operating systems to be separate from physical hardware on a ‘virtual machine’, allowing users to minimise the amount of hardware they require. From a hardware perspective, this also makes it possible to run more applications on the same hardware, which translates into cost savings for the manufacturer. If fewer servers are required, there will be lower capital expenditure and maintenance costs, and virtual servers can be centrally managed and monitored, allowing manufacturers to more easily achieve greater process consistency.
From a security and resilience perspective, there are also significant benefits of using virtual machines. Fewer physical servers and connections to the internet results in a significantly reduced ‘attack surface’. For resilience and faster back-up recovery, companies can create ‘snapshots’ of their system, allowing them to get back up and running more quickly and easily. Virtualisation delivers the ultimate flexibility for plant engineers as it allows them to easily commission new servers and adjust architecture as the business grows. It also minimises disruption by allowing engineers and IT staff to create testing or development environments where they can tweak or refine applications before rolling them out across the business.
Virtualisation may seem like an intimidating concept but corporate IT has already recognised its value and growing numbers of manufacturers are doing the same. Done well, it can deliver the flexibility to add or expand production lines or new plants and provide better control of IT costs by enabling server consolidation and lowering energy and maintenance costs. Most importantly, it can protect your business from the costly downtime associated with aging systems.
*source: Stratus Technologies
