Honeywell recently announced the availability of virtualisation support for its core product line, Experion Process Knowledge System (PKS) for both Distributed Control System (DCS) and SCADA applications.
With the latest additions to the company’s virtualisation portfolio, Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS) lays claim to being the only process industry vendor to offer a comprehensive virtualisation solution.
For many of today’s manufacturers, the process control environment requires separate servers to support different applications.
Virtualisation resolves this issue by allowing a single server to simultaneously run multiple operating systems and applications. It also improves reliability by insulating these operating systems from hardware changes and the net benefit to users results in lower operational costs.
HPS’ virtualisation offerings are developed with VMware, the world’s largest supplier of virtualisation products and solutions.
These solutions help industrial plants reduce PC hardware requirements and minimise the frequency and impact of operating system and hardware changes while simplifying overall system management and improving availability, reliability and disaster recovery.
The popularity of virtualisation is growing rapidly throughout the IT industry as a whole, with a recent study by Gartner showing that over 40 per cent of servers are virtualised today and that figure will rise to 75 per cent by 2015.
HPS’ holistic approach to industrial virtualisation encompasses the delivery and support of virtualisation infrastructure uniquely tailored to the needs of the process control industry.
Additionally, Honeywell provides a full range of applications that can be supported through virtualisation, providing end users with a complete solution right out of the box.
“As the broad shift in the IT industry towards virtualisation extends to the industrial marketplace, it’s becoming more and more common to see applications and infrastructure deployed virtually rather than physically,” said Paul Hodge, Experion Infrastructure & HMI Product Manager, Honeywell Process Solutions.
“Honeywell is the only company able to deliver total virtualisation support for process automation environments. We see virtualisation as game-changing, and our offerings have been developed as strategic, long-term automation tools.”