Pinellas County

In order to maintain high service levels in the face of a shrinking tax base, funding cuts and staffing challenges, a new automation system was required. To help keep everything running smoothly, Pinellas County Utilities (PCU) relies on a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system from Wonderware that monitors some 20,000 individual “objects” such as valves, pumps, temperature gauges, etc. When the county installed the system in 1999 for Y2K compliance, it took that opportunity to free itself from inflexible, expensive proprietary technology. In addition to improving system-wide monitoring and management, the new system enabled problems to get addressed faster, field technicians to accomplish more and tighter overhead expense control.

Keeping the water on is a public health and safety issue. We can’t tolerate any downtime. Replacing clustered failover servers with ftServers saved us a lot of money and simplified the entire operation. I’ve never looked back.”

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Key Features and Benefits

• Continuous availability solutions
• Plug-and-play operational simplicity
• A best-of-breed automation platform

Had he used server clusters instead of ftServer systems, Osborne figures the virtualization project cost would have doubled and taken weeks longer to implement. “When you compare the total cost of a fault-tolerant server solution to building a cluster, the investment is really a wash,” he said. “The fault-tolerant server is also more flexible and much simpler than buying many individual x86 servers. For me, the big benefit is support. Having Stratus engineers monitor and protect my server 24/7/365 costs less and is better than hiring a full-time technician. The server always runs and we never lose a thing. That’s peace of mind.”