06/09/2010

Avoiding Software Downtime to Maximise OEE

I'm always happy to post relevant articles from readers of the blog. This piece by Tracy Barlow of 24/7 Uptime discusses how to maximise OEE by protecting critical software from downtime or loss.

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Having recently read the Software Advice article “A Plain English Guide To Modern Manufacturing Methods” on International echem’s blog, there is something else to consider when looking to improve overall equipment efficiencies (OEE).

We all know that even a minute of downtime can mean lost productivity, lost profits, increased waste, compromised safety and damaged reputation. But whilst process automation solutions do much to accelerate, optimise and protect manufacturing processes, the software itself has to be protected from downtime or loss.

We researched the offerings available in this area and decided to work with a solution called everRun software from Marathon Technologies. everRun is a cost effective solution implemented on standard hardware/servers that keeps critical systems up and running upto 99.999% levels of availability.

Different systems do need different levels of protection because some are more business critical than others. However, continuous availability is becoming increasingly important to organisations. The application availability pyramid below shows the average yearly downtime suffered with different availability levels:





This technology protects environments by combining the components of two or more physical servers to ‘share’ components: hence faults such as disk array failure and/or loss of network card, etc, can be tolerated with zero impact on the processing environment. Even a full server failure is tolerated with zero downtime.

And this is how it does it:





Marathon everRun High Availability Diagram

I recently heard a very good summary description about this technology “From financial transaction systems at the New York Stock Exchange to pharmaceutical manufacturing companies, more than 3,500 customers worldwide use Marathon everRun to robustly protect their essential systems – and that’s a very high level of trust.”

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