News & Knowledge

Abstract A commercial drug manufacturer in collaboration with E Tech Group implemented a critical monitoring system that required environmental data to be recorded in a 21 CFR Part 11 compliant manner. With an intent to mitigate the risk of data loss, the drug manufacturer chose Vaisala instrumentation to read and locally store environmental data. The Vaisala instrumentation chosen can store environmental data locally on the device and report environmental data to an OPC-compliant SCADA system. The drug manufacturer had a need for a solution that moves data stored on the devices to the Rockwell Automation SCADA system in the event of data loss. E Tech Group provided a solution that detects data loss, recovers the lost data from the devices, and moves it to the SCADA system. The solution included a Windows service that polls the SCADA for gaps in historian data. If a gap is found, the solution pulls data from the buffers and populates it into the SCADA system. This provides redundancy and verification that critical data resides in a single repository, ensuring data integrity. The customer relied solely on the existing SCADA and used the most robust instrumentation to protect against critical data loss. Problem Statement The end-user chose Vaisala instrumentation equipped with loggers that provide data buffering to protect against critical data loss. However, the buffering capability did not integrate “off the shelf” with the existing SCADA, Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk. The buffered data from the loggers did not automatically populate data to the historian after a SCADA outage. Background The architecture selection allowed the customer to deviate from the more typical control system implementation which would include PLCs and remote I/O nodes. The architecture consisted of 150+ Vaisala temperature and humidity sensors and data loggers mounted throughout the facility. The data loggers have a 10-year internal battery … Continued