Case Study: High-Availability IT for a UK Food & Beverage Manufacturer

Carlsberg manufacturing facilities in Northampton, East Midlands, UK.

Carlsberg is one of the leading brewing groups in the world, with a large portfolio of beer and soft drinks brands. Its flagship brand, Carlsberg, is one of the fastest growing and best-known beer brands in the world. More than 30,000 people work for Carlsberg at 92 local production sites in 48 countries, and its products are sold in more than 150 markets. This Food and Beverage company produce in average about 83 million bottles of beer a day, or 100 million hectolitres of beer.

Carlsberg_SCADA_Failover

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A Failover Solution for a System Migration Project.

During the past five years prior to starting the project Carlsberg's SCADA system failed twice, both times through hardware faults. On each occasion it has taken for the manufacturer's system engineers about two to four hours to replace the hardware and reinstate the system. While their SCADA was inactive, brewing operations grounded to a halt.

The downtime loss resulting exclusively from produce not sold during from both faults was calculated at £1'600.000. A resilient system with a secure network design could have prevented this loss.

The decision was to upgrade their SCADA and at the same time ensure that the new system would never again suffer from significant interruptions to service. The customer's senior systems engineer at the Leeds brewery initiated a project that would include an external failover solution, as the primary mechanism within the new SCADA system did not match their availability requirements.

Failover is the transfer of workload and data from a primary system to a secondary system in the event of a failure. When the workload has been transferred, the secondary system is said to have taken over the workload of the failed primary system, allowing for high availability of information, systems and processes.

Carlsberg initially considered a Microsoft cluster. However, the system was complex and the cost prohibitive. Polestar Industrial IT recommended the data replication and failover capabilities of Double-Take. Thanks to this Carbonite solution in addition to a comprehensive network design from Polestar, it was possible to continuously replicate for physical, virtual and cloud workloads with push-button failover for keeping critical systems online all the time, and transmit data across high-speed connectivity bridges.