A municipal infrastructure company uses Stratus® ftServer® to protect an underground utility pipeline against critical system downtime
Jinhua Duohu Central Business District Construction Investment Co., Ltd. is a state-owned company in Eastern China responsible for the investment, financing, construction, and management of projects in a core urban area with significant development potential. The company’s projects include the Integrated Underground Pipeline System (IUPS), which carries electricity lines, water, heating and sewer pipes, and telecommunications and television cables within safe and accessible utility tunnels. The IUPS allows for direct infrastructure access for repair, maintenance, and monitoring without impacting the surrounding environment and its people. By mitigating problems like road zippers and overhead spider webs, the IUPS is fueling urban development and improving the quality of life in Jinhua.
Jinhua Duohu Central Business District Construction Investment Co., Ltd. is tasked with overseeing development of Jinhua’s underground utility pipeline in accordance with international standards and putting the state-of-the-art tunnel into full operation by 2020. A utility pipeline of this scope hosts a multitude of systems to monitor and control tunnel sound, lighting, temperature, humidity, static force, gas/liquid levels, surveillance cameras, and inspection robots. Data from all of these systems are transmitted through network communication switches to a centralised lworx platform, which encompasses database, monitoring, and communications applications as well as a video control center and remote access to tunnel systems via PC and mobile devices.
To maintain safe, secure, and efficient tunnel operations, the company needed a highly reliable, fault-tolerant solution to provide continuous availability of lworx systems. Why is always-on computing so critical? If the database goes down, all pipeline applications become immediately unavailable. In the event that the monitoring or communications applications experience downtime, transfer of tunnel data is interrupted and no one can see the status of tunnel conditions—all of which puts infrastructure integrity, safety, and utility service at risk.
At the same time, the IUPS project leaders wanted a solution that could support virtualisation—running multiple databases and applications in virtual machines on a single server—to improve resource utilisation, streamline system management, and adapt to business changes.
Shanghai Hi-Tech Control Systems (HITE), an industrial automation solution and system integration services provider working on the IUPS project, recommended that Jinhua Duohu Central Business District Construction Investment Co., Ltd. purchase the Stratus® ftServer® system to meet its stringent continuous availability and virtualisation requirements. In April 2018, the company deployed the Stratus ft2800 server, a fully integrated hardware and software platform that delivers better than nine five nines availability through redundant components, lockstep firmware, and data synchronisation.
Installed in the IUPS data center, the ftServer system is made up of two identical customer replaceable units, each with its own processors, memory, and storage. An Automated Uptime Layer provides the processor synchronisation, data replication, and logic needed to keep applications and data services up and running at all times. All transactions continue to be processed —even if a hardware component fails—eliminating the risk of data loss or corruption. Furthermore, ftServer’s Active Service Architecture with self-monitoring, self- diagnosing, and self-alerting systems simplifies management and filters issues that require action for added simplicity and peace of mind.
The company virtualised the IUPS database, monitoring, and communications applications as well as the unified platform management software on the ftServer system to optimise resource utilisation while saving space and reducing energy consumption. Even better, the project team achieved application virtualisation and continuous availability without failover scripts or application modifications for fast, easy deployment.
Since deploying the ftServer system, Jinhua Duohu Central Business District Construction Investment Co., Ltd. has experienced high reliability and stability of key tunnel data for always-on IUPS management, monitoring, and control. At the same time, the company has minimised the risk of database and application downtime events with a fully redundant, fault-tolerant continuous availability solution.
Centralising critical IUPS applications on a single ftServer system has simplified system management, saving time and effort for IUPS technical staff. In addition, ftServer’s ease of serviceability and maintenance is reducing total cost of ownership and accelerating time to value.
