High Availability cluster for the Gas Pipeline Telemetry System

Description

Adanto provides an easy automated communications process by which measurements and other data are collected at remote or inaccessible points and transmitted to receiving equipment for monitoring.

The Environment

Our oil and gas pipeline client had a physical location of a pipeline in a very challenging terrain with inaccessible stations. Consequently, they needed a technical solution that would remotely and in real-time monitor and measure the flow of natural gas through the pipeline.

The Challenges

  • Highly Available Data Cluster for gas company’s Billing System
  • Highly Available Data Cluster for the real-time gas flowing in a pipeline
  • Minimum maintenance with auto-healing feature (system’s auto updates)
  • Highly reliable, safe and environmentally friendly system

Services performed

Data Analytics & Business Intelligence

Data Warehousing

Big Data

Artificial Intelligence

Software Applications

Custom Application Development

DevOps

Security

Infrastructure Services

Goals

Safe, reliable, and environmentally friendly delivery of natural gas transportation services

Highly available data cluster for the billing system

Highly available, high-density data sampling cluster for real-time monitoring of natural gas flow characteristic

Minimum maintenance with auto-healing feature (system’s auto-updates)

Key features

  • 99.9% system availability
  • 500ms data sampling density
  • Full redundancy of hardware and software components
  • 6 months data retention for raw data
  • 3-year data retention for reporting data
  • RTO < 8h
  • RPO < 48h
  • Bare metal recovery
  • >3TB of telemetry data
  • >1000 data samples read per second
  • Max 40ms recovery time after network topology change
  • Tape library with 2 drives and 48 LTO 3 tapes.

Technologies used

  • IBM Power 6 servers running IBM AIX operating system
  • Power VM for load separation
  • Power HA for Telemetry System HA
  • Oracle RAC for database HA
  • Moxa Industrial Ethernet switches
  • CISCO Catalyst switches and routers
  • Brocade SAN switches
  • IBM Disk Storage
  • IBM Tape Storage
  • Tivoli Storage Manager

Result

Adanto designed and developed HA clusters that have been continuously operational for the last eight years.  The clusters’ design required minimum maintenance, for its auto-healing feature flawlessly performed all necessary system’s firmware upgrades, OS level upgrades, and software patches for the application.