Alstom Protects Beijing Metro Maintenance System For Business Continuity And High Availability With SIOS Protection Suite

Alstom Transport implemented SIOS software to safeguard maintenance system services for Beijing Metro. They also wanted to a solution that offered business continuity and high availability. They are a global leader in equipment and services for power generation and rail transport. They have selected SIOS to protect data and mission-critical applications used in the maintenance system services for Beijing Metro Line 2.

The Challenge

Alstom integrates the Urbalis™ solution. It is the most advanced signalling system in the world. As the brain and the nervous system of a mass transit network, its function is to control train movement and ensure train safety and optimize traffic operations. All this while providing system maintenance. In addition, its Maintenance Supervision System (MSS) centralizes detection of failures in trackside equipment. The system also provides remote diagnostics to forecast train stopping with swift and efficient replacement of faulty equipment. To manage these sophisticated maintenance systems, the Alstom Transport Urbalis R&D team needed a Linux environment virtual solution to give its client business continuity and high availability. And at the same time, optimizing the cost of ownership throughout the lifetime of the urban transport system.

The Solution

The team conducted extensive and thorough research for the best solution to meet their requirements. Finally, the Alstom IT team selected SIOS Protection Suite for Linux. It is a software application that ensures the continuous availability of applications and data by creating a fault resilient environment for virtual machines. SIOS software monitors applications to ensure that any fault is automatically detected and rectified while maintaining uninterrupted services.

Benefits

SIOS Protection Suite is ideal for any company seeking business continuity and high availability during downtime. It enables continuous operations of the Alstom maintenance system during planned downtime for maintenance or upgrades. This also applies in the event of a system failure or if an application ceases to respond. Alstom determined that it could reach a 99.995% uptime rate for their business critical applications. If the first server goes down due to an electrical outage or to unavailability of a network connection, data will be protected while applications failover to the second server. This failover capability provides a service window for maintenance to be conducted on the first server while the second server continues to operate. This means Alstom can plan for a maximum downtime of only two minutes (the time it takes to complete a failover). The SIOS solution also enables fault diagnostics to be sent remotely to operators. Therefore, it is no longer necessary for the Alstom team to ask operators to proactively check each deployed server individually.

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To read about how you can also achieve business continuity and high availability, go here