De Watergroep uses Siemens SINEC NMS
De Watergroep is the largest drinking water company in Flanders. With more than
1,500 employees, they work every day to supply water to 177 municipalities spread over West and East Flanders, Flemish Brabant and Limburg, through a network of 34,000 km of pipes. Their mission is to deliver quality drinking water at an acceptable price.
In the Water production centre De Blankaart in Diksmuide, where they make drinking water from surface water from the Ijzer and the polders of the Blankaart area, the installations are currently being renovated. This renovation is part of the 'Masterplan De Blankaart' to increase the supply capacity of the water production centre.
In one of those renovations, more specifically the new after-treatment facility, ATS' Automation BU played an important role in the implementation of a new redundant server infrastructure. A server infrastructure where performance and availability are extremely important.
Redundant server setup
In two separate server rooms, a Siemens 'Core Layer 3' switch is placed each time. Concretely, these switches will be coupled to the MRP ring of the production site, built from the scalance switch material already present.
The new core switches have a number of important functionalities:
- Vlan segmentation of the various subnets
- Redundant routing of all traffic via the VRRP protocol
- Statistics of the load on the different ports
Industrial network management
Further on in the server infrastructure, ATS integrated the network management system 'SINEC NMS' from Siemens, which takes care of the management of the entire network. Large networks can easily be managed with it, with a transparent view on the entire architecture. In addition to managing the network, this system will also monitor and alarm where necessary. In this way, proactive action can be taken, even before any network problems can cause a production outage.
SINEC NMS is the network management system from Siemens for complex network structures in an increasingly digital world.
SINEC NMS
The SINEC NMS system can be used to centrally monitor, manage and configure industrial networks with tens of thousands of devices around the clock - also for safety-related areas.
SINEC NMS is therefore the first choice for complex network structures. Thanks to its scalability, SINEC NMS can evolve as a network grows in size and complexity.
Communication networks in industry 4.0 environment
In addition, WinCC TIA Professional V17 was also implemented in a redundant setup with client server environment and web access. The optional Siemens package 'Alarm Control Center' is responsible for the necessary alarms via SMS and e-mail to smartphones.
Another option is 'Industrial Databridge' which connects WinCC to the parent applications within the Office network. This option provides a flexible connection between different applications.
