Invensys’ Operations Management unit is claiming an industry first for its virtualization technology, now certified for high availability, disaster recovery and fault tolerance in supervisory control applications. Maryanne Steidinger, director of product marketing, explained, ‘The ArchestrA/InTouch 2012 releases leverage either VMware or Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization technology to offer high-availability and disaster-recovery.’
Virtualization means that a single physical machine can run multiple, separate instances of an operating system and software. Hardware resource use is optimized and applications can run on whatever operating system they require. Virtualization is claimed to ease the movement of applications between different host computers, enabling various fail-safe scenarios to be implemented. The system was demonstrated at the 2011 OpsManage event when a primary system in Florida failed-over to a backup disaster recovery system in California.
In a separate announcement, Invensys reported that consultants Arc Advisory Group found that the Wonderware human machine interface (HMI) software is a world wide leader in market share. Rashesh Mody, senior VP software observed, ‘This progress is all down to organic growth as Invensys has not acquired any other HMI companies in recent history. Our HMI installed base now approaches 700,000 licenses.’ More on the study from Arc Advisory Group.