March 20, 2006
The previous week was one of the critical weeks for the project. We had a meeting with the engineering contractors to discuss our future plans. From our discussion with the engineers, it is clear that the selection of the hardware for the 38 RTU stations will be decided soon. Also, we put together a summary of the work that we had done until that point and requested an approval for the graphics so that we could proceed with the remaining 12 booster stations.
The most important concern for us at this point is to provide a working and an efficient system to the end users as soon as possible. It has been more than 6 months since we got the notice to proceed. Due to the frequent delays in decision making, the cost of the proposed system has gone higher. We have spent a lot of time on research and testing. We are sure that we can make the SCADA system work efficiently. It depends on how quickly the other two phases are planned and put into action.
On the technical front, we tested the redundancy of our OPC server using VPN connection between the two redundant servers. All our servers have dual Network Interface Cards. Initially we had connected the second network card of both the servers on a different switch to provide redundancy. The first network card of both the OPC servers were connected to different routers to provide different static IPs. However, we ran into some networking issues. We finally decided to use only one network connection and VPN both the OPC servers to provide reliable redundant system. We shall make those changes to the actual servers this week. We shall let you know how it goes.
