Marathon & Sugar Refining Company

Hitting the sweet spot thanks to 24/7 Uptime and Marathon everRun MX

The Organisation

The organisation is a household name sugar refining company that is famous around the world. Established more than 100 years ago, the company operates from a 40+ acre head office in the South of England. The company has the capacity to produce and package 25,000 tonnes of sugar per week.

The Situation

The company relies on leading real-time operation management software from Wonderware. Wonderware Historian reduces manufacturing costs, increases production throughput and product quality in manufacturing and infrastructure operations. The company is using Marathon everRun MX to protect Wonderware Historian, a high performance real-time database for historical information. It combines the power and flexibility of a standard SQL relational database with the speed and compression of a true process Historian.

Wonderware Historian is designed to collect a wide variety of plant data, at full resolution and at very high data rates without any real limit to data volume. This ensures decision makers at all levels have the core data they need to drive vital productivity improvement initiatives through context specific information reporting.

Advanced data retrieval modes enable plant personnel to quickly generate the detailed, focused information needed to accelerate the decision-making process and provide access to the right information when a problem is identified or an opportunity uncovered.

Wonderware Historian is the most critical application deployed at this plant but does not come with inbuilt redundancy. Because of this, Wonderware Historian needed protection to ensure production was not affected by unplanned downtime. Both Wonderware and Marathon everRun MX are the preferred solutions of the company.

The Solution

Marathon everRun MX was selected to protect the critical environments to the highest levels of system fault tolerance, ensuring zero interruption in all cases. In particular, the ability to protect multiple processing environments using a single availability solution was a big benefit to the company. 24/7 Uptime were recommended as services partners and provided technical consultancy to check and advise on protecting the proposed environments.

24/7 Uptime then undertook the build of the everRun MX solution. This was a two stage process. 24/7 Uptime technical consultants returned to site to complete testing once Wonderware had been installed in order to check the system under production conditions, sign off the project and commission the new live environment. The final phase also included setting up integrated alerting within Marathon everRun MX and Wonderware. These alerts provide the company’s IT team and production management staff with real-time workload level monitoring information.

The Results

The C&I Projects Team Leader comments: “It has been a very smooth installation process. 24/7 Uptime were extremely thorough in their pre-install due diligence; we had already ordered our hardware but 24/7 Uptime pointed out additional requirements that we hadn’t considered. The installation engineer was very knowledgeable, open and frank and explained what he was doing at every stage of the project.”

He continues: “Whilst the fault tolerant system has yet to be tested in earnest we have full confidence that, should one of our servers have a problem or crash, the Marathon installation will keep us up and running and tolerate any problems. This is essential for our reporting and manufacturing processes.”