Northwind Solutions – Eramosa develops SCADA System Backups for Nine Utility Scale Solar Generation Plants

Northwind Solutions

Eramosa develops SCADA System Backups for Nine Utility Scale Solar Generation Plants

Northwind Solutions and Great Circle Solar approached Eramosa to provide consulting services to develop a plan for capturing critical SCADA system backups of nine (9) utility scale solar generating stations.  The nine (9) portfolios consisted of SCADA platforms using Wonderware InTouch operating in a Microsoft Windows Hyper-V virtual environment, Wonderware InTouch running in a non-virtualized environment, and a Kepware datalogger running in a non-virtualized environment.

Eramosa completed site audits at the onset of the project to investigate and document the existing SCADA systems in conjunction with developing as-built SCADA network documentation. This detailed understanding of the system was used to verify that the approach and methodology for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity is acceptable for the specific application.

Eramosa completed Physical to Virtual (P2V) images of each system to create system backups that could be deployed in a VMWare virtual environment. P2V images can be rapidly deployed to agnostic hardware in the event of a failure scenario of the ageing physical servers previously installed at each facility.  Once site audits and P2Vs were completed the relevant information and virtual machines were loaded to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for long term storage.

In the final stage of the project Eramosa developed detailed manuals for re-deployment of each system and completed hands on training for the client.