Water Infrastructure Company Replaces Point-To-Point VPN With MQTT

Ignition Platform Allows For Synced Alarming Across Distributed Architecture

According to Goodnight Midstream’s Chief Information Officer, Kevin Cooper, “For anybody who has done large-scale networks, especially distributed out to edges that are way out in the middle of nowhere, VPN tunnels can be the bane of your existence.”

That’s especially true for Goodnight Midstream, a produced water infrastructure company for oil & gas producers, because unlike traditional methods for produced water transportation, Goodnight Midstream has an extensive network of water-gathering and transportation pipelines across the US. This network allows for saltwater to reach geologically sustainable disposal wells while eliminating greenhouse gas emissions produced by trucks and protecting freshwater resources.

Finding An Alternative To Point-To-Point VPNs

Goodnight Midstream’s SCADA architecture consisted of multiple point-to-point VPN tunnels for securely connecting their facilities and central hub. Managing each VPN connection’s firewall became complex as each required configuration, monitoring, and maintenance. This traditional point-to-point VPN setup also limited the growth of Goodnight Midstream’s infrastructure because of the additional resources necessary to individually connect and reconfigure every existing site to each new VPN. “It was not uncommon for us to come into work in the morning and have seven or eight tickets at the help desk because reports weren’t working the way they were supposed to and inevitably we would trace that back to a VPN tunnel,” said Cooper.

Goodnight Midstream’s existing SCADA software provided some challenges for them as well. Simple changes like adding objects in the application screen required users to access the development environment. Moreover, maintaining version consistency — such as performing patch management across endpoints, historians, and data centers — proved cumbersome. If a data center was updated or a patch applied, the endpoints would become “orphaned,” meaning that they were invisible until they could be updated to the matching version. Manually updating each endpoint (over 100 in total) was not only time-consuming but required external contractors, which added to the operational complexity, use of resources, and overall cost.

A Deep Project Scope

These opportunities for improvement prompted Goodnight Midstream to seek help from CSE ICON, a professional services company specializing in customized solutions for industrial automation, SCADA, and Digital Transformation. From the beginning, Goodnight Midstream prepared a robust scope document outlining what they wanted to achieve, including:

  • Remove the point-to-point VPNs to decrease complexity and administrative effort.
  • Implement MQTT to transfer data faster and benefit from secure Internet connections.
  • Replace the existing SCADA system with Ignition.

Goodnight Midstream chose Ignition — an industrial automation platform for SCADA, HMI, IIoT, and more — because it could fulfill several requirements:

  • Data mining and business intelligence work on the system backend.
  • Powerful Linux-based edge deployments.
  • Easy upgrades that could be performed by administrative staff.
  • Location data driven by an external database.
  • Template support.

There was also the monetary benefit. “Ignition is very cost competitive. When you’re looking at what your total cost of software is over time, having Ignition be very robust technologically, but also very affordable is incredibly important,” said Cooper.

Based on Goodnight Midstream’s goals, CSE ICON defined the project scope along with the key objectives. The main focus was to design a gateway architecture and implement MQTT in the field to bring data up to the enterprise. To accomplish this, CSE ICON needed to perform:

  • Installation and configuration of gateways.
  • Installation and configuration of an MQTT broker.
  • Creation of UDTs (User Defined Types) and instances for Ignition.
  • Migration of data from their existing SCADA system to Ignition.
  • Streamlined patch management.

“We felt that Goodnight was very thorough in their scope of work documentation and it made it a lot easier for us to implement the functionality that they required,” said Binh Vu, SCADA Solutions Manager at CSE ICON.

Read the rest of the case study to see how Ignition provided the solution

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