A consulting company specialising in emergency standby power control systems, load management control systems and monitoring solutions offers a host of technical services to other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), engineering firms, and end users that require quick, responsive engineering services of critical power systems. The company’s target market includes data centers, hospitals and municipalities that need to upgrade aging emergency power systems or need to expand existing systems to facilitate growth. Today, these end-user customers face increasing critical power demand within the same space, which requires additional generators, switchgear and control systems. Oftentimes, the existing systems contain obsolete controls, or controls that do not afford expansion capabilities.

One of the consulting firm’s end-user customers was a large government agency that sought to improve its system reliability in its data center by installing redundancy in the master control system. The agency had disparate standalone systems with multiple points of failure, which did not provide the level of reliability or security needed. The agency turned to the consulting firm’s industry and technical expertise to help implement a new solution with the latest technologies.

The consulting company selected Emerson and installed a new redundancy solution for the agency using PACSystemsTM RX3i redundant edge controllers. The industrial edge controllers offer connectivity to various I/O on a proven industrial network that provides deterministic data and automatic switchover for continuous operations.

The new redundancy solution operates as a single system to the overall operations, eliminating the complex preparations usually needed to synchronise data between other applications and external systems. It also features remote I/O to support redundant Ethernet LANs and a wide variety of network modules.

Having removed the multiple points of failure that were present before, the agency now has increased system integrity, reliability and security with the new solution. In addition, the PACSystems RX3i edge controller’s open and flexible architecture enabled the consulting firm to leverage the agency’s existing technology equipment, saving significant time and money.

The engineering firm was able to help its customer achieve several key results, including:        

•           Minimised downtime through robust, dual-redundancy capabilities

•           Increased productivity due to fast, powerful synchronisation and the ability to

            maintain individual system components without interruption

•           Lower total cost of ownership by leveraging existing hardware and software

            investments through flexible, scalable, open architectures     

•           Increased system integrity by eliminating multiple points of failure

•           Time savings and reduced engineering costs with easy configuration and quick

            startup and maintenance