Alstom ensures business continuity of Beijing metro maintenance system with SteelEye LifeKeeper
Alstom Transport has implemented SteelEye LifeKeeper to safeguard maintenance system services for Beijing metro lines leading to Capital Airport and the Olympic Center
Alstom, a global leader in equipment and services for power generation and rail transport, has chosen SteelEye Technology to protect data and mission-critical applications of the maintenance system services for Beijing Metro Line 2 which is a 16km circle line around central Beijing connecting to the Olympic Centre and the Airport Express Line which connects the town centre to the Capital Airport.
SteelEye LifeKeeper controls and manages high availability and potential faults to ensure the continuous availability of maintenance services for these two crucial metro lines in China's capital.
As part of its offer, Alstom integrates the Urbalis™ solution, the most advanced signalling system in the world. It is the brain and the nervous system of a mass transit network and its function is to control train movement, ensure train safety and optimise traffic operations while providing system maintenance.
The Maintenance Supervision System (MSS) centralises detection of failures in trackside equipment. It provides remote diagnostics to forecast train stopping with swift and efficient replacement of faulty equipment.
The challenge
The Alstom Transport Urbalis R&D team needed a Linux environment virtual solution to offer its client continuity and availability of the maintenance system, whilst optimising cost of ownership throughout the lifetime of the urban transport system.
The Alstom Urbalis R&D based its maintenance system on an open source architecture but the stability of the high availability open source software was unsatisfactory. The Alstom IT team even considered developing a data and application protection solution internally.
Selection criteria included regular solution upgrades to ensure an efficient centralised maintenance system in the long run and the feasibility of implementing identical solutions for other worldwide metro lines. Hence, it was also important to be able to transfer configuration know-how.
Solution
After a thorough research for the best solution to meet their requirements, the Alstom IT team chose SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux. It is a software application that ensures the continuous availability of applications and data by creating a fault resilient environment for virtual machines. LifeKeeper monitors applications to ensure that any fault is automatically detected and rectified while maintaining uninterrupted services.
Maurice Guizard, R&D Manager for Alstom Urbalis platform centralised maintenance said "High availability is key for the maintenance of modern transport systems because there aren't many staff on the ground to understand and act. This feature is centralised and managed 24/7 by our software applications and will alert the most skilled individual to solve an issue. We implemented SteelEye LifeKeeper for its simplicity of use and its efficiency. In 2009, a centralised maintenance system shouldn't add maintenance issues to operations."
The solution was distributed by iO Partner, an authorised SteelEye Solution Centre in France. The system was configured by Adelux, and deployed by the Alstom TIS (Transport Information Solution) team. Once the configuration was done, installing LifeKeeper only took two hours for each server. iO Partner and Adelux engineers provided the appropriate support.
François Samarcq, managing director of iO Partner said "The fact that Alstom chose to integrate LifeKeeper within a highly complex urban transport infrastructure project shows that Alstom trusts SteelEye for its reliable solutions and the quality of its deployment and technical support."
Benefits
LifeKeeper enables continuous operations of the Alstom maintenance system during planned downtime for maintenance or upgrades as well as in the event of a system failure or if an application ceases to respond. Alstom determined that it could reach a 99.995% uptime rate for business critical applications.
If the first server goes down due to electrical outage or to unavailability of a network connection, data will be protected while applications failover to the second server. This failover capability provides a service window for maintenance to be conducted on the first server while the second server continues the operation. It means that Alstom can plan for a maximum downtime of 2 minutes (the time it takes to complete a failover).
The SteelEye solution enables fault diagnostics to be sent remotely to operators. It is therefore not necessary for the Alstom team to ask operators to go and check each deployed server individually.
Maurice Guizard added "Once LifeKeeper is fully tested for the two Beijing metro lines, it will be very easy to replicate the implementation of an identical solution to future similar projects. Our objective is to use LifeKeeper to ensure continuity of the maintenance system for metro lines we have won the tender for, including Milan line 1, São Paulo lines 1, 2, 3 and the Marmaray line, linking European and Asian sides of Istanbul across the Bosporus."
