"We used to have one to six days downtime if a server blew. Now our worst case downtime is 30 minutes." Covidien's Tom Oberbeck on the ability of server virtualization to increase production availability.
Tom Oberbeck of the Mallinkrodt division of
Covidien in Saint Louis told much the same story. "We virtualized our central utility control system when we did the latest project for our new central utility plant," he said. "The Mallinkrodt campus is 145 years old and badly needed a new steam and chill water distribution and control system. We reduced our footprint from 22 PCs to two duplicate SANs [storage area networks] and 11 thin clients. We reported to management a $120,000 cost avoidance initially, and an additional $100,000 savings for future server upgrades, mostly in reduced hardware costs."
High Availability Protects Production
Jeff Moore, senior electrical engineer from Gallus Biopharmaceuticals of St. Louis, along with Steven Schneebeli, lead systems engineer for Malisko Engineering, also of St. Louis, said that they used virtualization to aid Gallus in changing from a "big pharma" manufacturer to a flexible, nimble contract manufacturing organization (CMO).
Key to the company's transformation was a portable, dual-bioreactor control station. It replaced the end-of-life Windows NT solutions they'd been running. "It gave us high availability, reduced HMI requirements and even reduced the number of ControlLogix PACs. It is robust enough to be portable," Moore said.
"We used to have one to six days downtime if a server blew," added Covidien's Oberbeck, "and now our worst case downtime is 30 minutes. Virtualization gives us very high availability, at a continuing savings in energy."
"If we are down for a day, we lose a $1 million batch," said Amlyn's Fulop. "Now we can lose a blade server and automatically failover to a back-up server without the operator even noticing."