Cloud starts to lift
1 Feb 2012
Although virtualisation is still in its early days within industry, Rockwell Automation has already seen a high level of adoption, according to Ben Mansfield, marketing manager for the US-based company’s process automation systems.
“We are seeing adoption in industries like consumer goods, life sciences and, increasingly, some of the mining and chemicals sectors and oil & gas,” Mansfield said, in an interview at Rockwell’s Automation Fair 2011 in Chicago.
It’s not just about virtualising the DCS or supervisory layers, he added, pointing to the use of virtual system replicas for operator training and proving of new concepts. Companies, he added, are starting to use virtualisation for support, so that if there is a problem with a system they can send a virtual snapshot to the automation vendor for analysis.
Among the early adopters is Alberta, Canada-based Grizzly Oil Sands, which recently awarded Rockwell a $4million-plus process automation contract to help it produce more than 5,000bpd of oil from its Algar Lake project. The remote location of the project led to the local control room being backed by a shadow control room, built on a virtualised computing environment at the company’s Calgary headquarters.
Shadow control
“This unique, open architecture is an important reason Rockwell Automation won the order,” said Brian Harrison, vice president engineering, Grizzly Oil Sands. The shadow control room, he added, will now also be used to monitor and control all the company’s current and future oil sites across northern Alberta.
Virtualisation has also, recently, found favour at a major steel maker in Canada, said Mansfield, This marked a turnaround from about a year and a half ago, when the company when was planning a major steel mill retrofit.
“At that time, I mentioned how virtualisation might help them by consolidating their architecture and making it easier to manage,” said the Rockwell manager. “However, they just looked at me kind of funny, as they were not familiar with the technology.”
About 14 months later, though, after a series of “high-level” talks and presentations about virtualisation, the steel maker signed a purchase order with Rockwell for a complete turnkey DCS revamp of the mill on virtualisation.
Mansfield also highlighted a case study in the life sciences industry, where a customer achieved significant savings by using virtualisation to extend its operations in a highly “validated and regulated” process environment.
“They had some software in a place running on Windows NT,” he explained. “As they didn’t want to keep it running on Windows NT, they virtualised it through a modern piece of hardware. Then, if they had failures, such as to a hard drive or network card, as they replaced the computer they just moved the image, without having to revalidate.”
From these and other experiences to date, Mansfield believes that many of the barriers to the adoption of virtualisation are “more perceived than actual.” Many of the early adopters, he noted, tend to be already focused on IT convergence and on getting more information from their control systems.
“Typically, these are places where [engineers] see a value in working with IT … and the traditional barriers with IT have come down,” said Mansfield. “Also, when IT says ’it’s okay’, the automation department starts to become more comfortable with the solution.”
Honeywell Q&A
Weighing up costs and benefits
Despite the potential gains, many remain cautious about virtualisation - as highlighted at a recent Honeywell User Group meeting in Baveno, Italy.
Among the main concerns was security, with one customer asking a Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS) expert panel “does virtualisation mean putting all your eggs in one basket?”
The answer from the panel, led by Jean-Marie Alliet, HPS sales support director in EMEA, was: “We put some eggs in one basket, but not all of them … and also strengthen and protect the baskets … by equipping servers with various redundancy features and then leveraging virtualisation capabilities to further protect the system”
Others asked if virtualisation would add another costly level of dependency, with VMware next to Microsoft. But while virtualisation does add another layer, the panel said that - unlike with an operating system - any upgrades or patches can be applied “non-disruptively” to plant operations.
Another issue was that as customers are charged for the hardware, then the software and now for VMware licenses, virtualisation would increase costs rather than decrease them. The panel replied that going down the virtualisation route “can be more expensive, however you are getting significant benefits in productivity. You need to put a dollar value on that.”
