Lowering The ‘Total Cost Of Ownership" Of Your SCADA System

The story of Ocala, Florida

Located directly in the middle of Florida is the City of Ocala. While the city includes just under fiftythousand people, it boasts a water plant capable of processing 20 million gallons of water each day, two water reclamation facilities, 321 miles of water lines, 284 miles of sewer mains, 96 lift stations and spray irrigation systems that safely return reuse water to the environment.

Until 2001, the City maintained separate DataFlow (DFS) and Intellution SCADA software systems for monitoring and control of their lift station network and their water treatment plant. The City was interested in finding a solution to the rising cost of managing both of these systems, however, neither of the two existing systems was capable of monitoring all installed equipment.

In 2001, Ocala purchased VTScada, under Trihedral's Competitive Upgrade Offer, to replace the lift-station SCADA system. Using the VTScada database conversion utility, central monitoring of the city's 96 lift-stations was converted to VTScada in a single day. All existing lift station status screens and data points were recreated automatically, by VTScada, through the conversion utility. By day two, the system was fully functional and included primary and hot back-up servers, remote laptop access, and dial-in access for alarm status, and dial-out alarm event notification.

After using their VTScada application for a year, operations staff, maintenance staff and management were particularly impressed with its high reliability, its ease of use, and the exceptional support provided by Trihedral engineers. Aware that VTScada could also convert the Intellution iFIX32 databases at their other facilities; the city evaluated the cost of such a conversion against their existing SCADA support costs for training, support and PC upgrades. Management quickly realized that converting all of the systems to VTScada would actually save more money than the conversion would cost. By converting both to VTScada, the city would also now have a single point of contact for user training and system maintenance. The decision was made to migrate all of the city's SCADA systems to VTScada.

The City of Ocala now runs four VTScada systems that can be configured to share data between one another and to perform as a single, multiple-redundant, hot back-up network.

SOURCE: Trihedral Engineering Limited