Guillermo Cisneros with Emerson local business partner Caltrol and Emerson's Milton Pollard shared insights into how to prevent data loss. Their abstract:
Today's production processes are heavily dependent on computer systems where any system downtime can result in huge production delays and cost over runs that will impact the bottom line. In case of a system crash, time is money and having the ability to bring your workstations online quickly and efficiently can protect your production investment. Caltrol discusses their customer's decision process, implementation and business benefits from using Backup and Recovery to enhance their data protection/disaster recover strategies.
Milton opened noting how every minute is critical when disaster strikes your computer environment. 31% of users have files due to events beyond their control. So what do you do when disaster strikes?
A backup and recovery solution is available through Emerson's Lifecycle Services team. Working with Acronis to provide backup and recovery. It is compatible with DeltaV v9.3.1 and later. Milton shared the user interface to give a quick overview of the DeltaV backup status. It also as a Universal Restore that allows the restoration of an image backup on to a dissimilar or similar server or workstation.
He identified two services that are available for backup and recovery—installation and verification & recovery services. The installation service helps get everything planned, installed, and commissioned to fit the plants security architecture. The verification & recovery service assures the backups are continually operating per the defined backup schedule. It also verifies that the saved backups are recoverable in the event of a data failure.
Guillermo shared a story of a biotech manufacturer who experienced a water pipe break nearby the server rooms where three different midsize DeltaV systems resided. The flood did not affect the server room but other areas next to it. The event was considered a "near miss" and challenged their Disaster Recovery plans. They decided to acquire licenses for the Emerson Backup and Recovery application. The initial backups were set to run in manual mode and not scheduled.
After some initial installation and upgrade issues, the second on site visit the four servers successfully ran automated / scheduled backups by changing the Volume Shadow Copy service setting to Hardware Select Automatically and restarting the SQL Server VSS service. The site has a total of four DeltaV Systems running on different versions. One hot spare server can be restored on dissimilar hardware by using Universal Restore license and Disk Image backup.
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