Marathon and Wonderware Keep Rich Products Running 24/7
THE COMPANY
Rich Products has grown from a niche maker of soybased whipped toppings and frozen desserts to a major frozen foods manufacturer. The company sells more than 2,000 products in 75 countries worldwide. With approximately $2.5B in sales in 2005, the company has 7,000 employees worldwide.
THE SITUATION
Rich Products’ Arlington, Tennessee, processing facility produces whipped toppings, puddings and other similar products on a continuous, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week schedule.
The facility produces its products in large batches using the Wonderware Historian to collect a wide range of critical data throughout the process. Continuous data collection is a necessity for Rich Products to ensure that its products are manufactured to the highest levels of quality and in full compliance with all FDA and other regulatory requirements.
“Because of the continuous nature of our data collection, a failure in our historian could shut down the entire production line and have costly consequences for us,” said Brian Mudra, Project Manager, Rich Products. These consequences include:
- Pipes and tanks could clog, resulting in significant waste and downtime.
- FDA-required data collection could be interrupted to the extent that the product has to be discarded.
- Lack of control may cause processing errors resulting in rejected product.
THE NEED
Rich Products needed an uptime solution that would protect their historian from downtime due to faults and failures. In addition, they needed a solution that would not require changes to their current infrastructure or modifications to existing configurations and policies. “We also wanted a solution that would not add complexity or require extensive training for our system administrators,” said Mudra.
THE EVALUATION
Rich Products considered using a cluster-based solution from a major vendor. However, their evaluation process determined that the failover required by a cluster solution could not meet their availability or their minimum loss of data requirements. “Failovers are inherently unreliable and cause a pause in operations that we cannot tolerate,” said Mudra.
THE SOLUTION
Rich Products choose to protect their Wonderware Historian with Marathon everRun software. This software application works with off-the-shelf Windows servers and an unmodified Wonderware Historian and delivers continuous availability and data protection.
Servers protected with everRun software operate continuously through faults, failures, and even disasters with no data loss, no pause in operation, and no loss of connectivity.
THE RESULTS
Since installing the Marathon software, Rich Products’ Wonderware Historian has operated continuously and has not dropped a single byte of data.
“We are very pleased with our Marathon everRun servers,” said Mudra. “We have the level of redundancy and reliability we require in a simple-to-use Windows-based solution.”
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