Today’s always-on society requires technology platforms to offer seamless, disruption-free experiences to adapt to consumer expectations. If an eCommerce or social media site crashes temporarily, individuals are quick to voice their frustration on public channels. However, the industrial automation industry arguably faces even bigger detriments if businesses experience a server crash. One disruption, and a slew of applications could fail, resulting in monumental costs and reputation risk.
Therefore, physical and digital infrastructure must always be available. Plants, for instance, require digitally foolproof solutions that guarantee 100 percent application availability. With these types of businesses, “close enough” solutions simply don’t cut it—and that’s where operational technology (OT) solutions come into play.
When an industrial automation business employs virtualization and runs several applications on a single server, a temporary crash, breakdown, or failure has a significantly larger impact than if each application ran on its own server. However, the key to virtualization success lies in continuous availability and system fault tolerance.
The Good News? There’s a Solution Available.
Stratus’ ftServer integrates these key technologies into a single, simple solution that seamlessly molds into industrial automation environments.
Continuous availability rises even higher on the must-have list when businesses adopt asset management. In order to attain accurate analytics, complete data must be available. The more robust the data is, the stronger the analytics are. Our continuous availability ensures that companies receive complete data to inform their analytics, thereby enabling them to leverage the most reliable results possible to proactively manage production assets.
Ultimately, continuous availability has transformed into a non-negotiable factor for the industrial automation industry’s business-critical applications. Industrial automation environments cannot risk the downtime of important applications, as well as the significant costs and consequences that follow any system failure. Furthermore, IA businesses are increasingly trying to unburden the workloads of OT professionals, who seldom have the necessary resources or experience needed to manage complex infrastructures.
There’s no better time to work on building optimal foundations for future asset management strategies and IIoT than now. With easy-to-deploy OT solutions that also provide low-maintenance upkeep, IA environments can be well on their way to delivering the strongest results possible for their clients.
For more, download our paper and grasp the challenges today’s OT professionals face in difficult Industrial Automation environments.
