Life Sciences (U.S.)

Letting Go of the Legacy
​​​​​​​A global Life Sciences company wanted to take advantage of the improved reliability and control possible in newer distributed control systems (DCS). However, the operating system (OS) running the DCS was no longer supported, and the old server hardware wouldn’t allow for an OS upgrade.
Because of the high costs of production downtime required to take the DCS completely offline for replacement, the company found itself chained to old software and hardware. They needed an updated solution that would not only deliver the newest version of DeltaV™ distributed control system, but also allow the company to implement future upgrades without concern for hardware requirements.
Downtime means lost revenue. When forced to choose between the systems they want and the uptime they need, many plants simply make do with less. This company found another way.

Unchaining Hardware and Software through Virtualization
The project team chose Emerson’s DeltaV Virtualization solution because of the cost savings and opportunity to significantly reduce downtime during migration. The move to virtualization would dramatically reduce the company’s hardware footprint, and would decouple hardware and software, allowing the organization to easily perform updates and upgrades in the future. Workstation and server failures would no longer be a concern, as new virtual machines could be easily recreated in minutes, and all management could be performed from a central location. Virtualization would also increase disaster recovery capability and improve availability site-wide.

Eliminating Costs by Eliminating Hardware
By running DeltaV in a virtual environment, The organization was able to eliminate project costs by removing unnecessary hardware. Not only was the company able to save hardware purchasing costs, but the reduced footprint of the control system hardware meant a savings in cabling, power, and cooling, as well as avoidance of the need for a costly data center expansion.
More importantly, virtualization provided the organization with the ability to build a test environment that ran parallel with the legacy DCS equipment, meaning the plant could perform its downtime tasks that required the old control system while the upgrade team implemented the new one. Overall, the virtualization initiative delivered the best of both worlds: avoiding costly investments in data center and hardware expansions while delivering improved performance and reliability.