Beijing Metro: Railway Technology
Ensuring Business Continuity for Beijing Metro
How Alstom uses SteelEye LifeKeeper to achieve an efficient centralised maintenance system which ensures any systems fault is automatically detected and rectified, thus providing uninterrupted services for Beijing Metro's passengers
With any major transportation hub, the continuous availability of maintenance systems is critical to providing the highest level of service to passengers. As part of an expansion plan to upgrade Beijing Metro's infrastructure, Alstom Transport, a global leader in equipment and services for power generation and rail transport, had to integrate the Urbalis solution, the most advanced signalling system in the world for Beijing Metro Line 2. The implementation would ensure train safety and optimize traffic operations while providing system maintenance across Beijing's most critical rail line.
The challenge
The Urbalis solution 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. As part of its offer, Alstom also had to protect data and mission-critical applications of the maintenance system services for Beijing Metro.
To ensure continuity and availability of the maintenance system for Beijing Metro, the Alstom Transport Urbalis R&D team needed a Linux environment virtual solution that would optimise the cost of ownership throughout the lifetime of the urban transport system. The team first considered basing its maintenance system on open source architecture but the stability of the high availability open source software was unsatisfactory. They even considered developing a data and application protection solution internally.
The solution
After thorough research for the best solution to meet their requirements, the Alstom team turned to SteelEye® LifeKeeper® for Linux. Selection criteria during the process included regular solution upgrades to ensure an efficient centralised maintenance system in the long run and the feasibility of implementing identical solutions for other metro lines. Hence, it was also important to be able to transfer configuration know-how. With LifeKeeper, Alstom found that any fault in the systems would be automatically detected and rectified, thus providing uninterrupted services for Beijing Metro's passengers.
LifeKeeper also created a fault resilient environment for virtual machines by monitoring to ensure the continuous availability of applications
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. With LifeKeeper, Alstom determined that it could reach a 99.995 percent uptime rate for business critical applications, which means virtually uninterrupted operations for Beijing Metro.
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 operations. In the event of an unplanned emergency or downtime, this means that Alstom can plan for a maximum downtime of only two minutes before operations are running normally again.
The SteelEye solution also enables fault diagnostics to be sent remotely to operators, making it unnecessary for the Alstom team to ask operators to go and check each deployed server individually. This automation helps Beijing Metro save costs on resources and time so that operators can focus on providing the highest level of service for the metro's passengers.
"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," Guizard continued. "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."
