Australasian alcoholic beverages company Lion Nathan has introduced new technology that is helping to ensure the flow of beer to drinkers across Australia and New Zealand.
StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect disk-based real time recovery solution is employed at eight Lion Nathan breweries to back up the servers that run supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and telemetry systems which monitor the brewing process.
The company employs 1,800 Australians and 1,400 New Zealanders. Brands include Australian favourites like Tooheys, XXXX, Hahn, J.Boag - Son, Swan and West End, plus New Zealand beers including Lion Red, Speights, Waikato Draught, Canterbury Draught, Steinlager and Mac’s.
Lion Nathan has deployed a number of standardised Automation and MES systems at its various breweries. These include iFix SCADA and iBatch batch management systems, as well as iHistorian and Proficy Plant Apps from GE Fanuc that collects historical and reporting data. Plant supervisors are able to view individual phases or complete procedures in real time, build comparisons and assess how batches are running at each site. Leaders can look at key performance indicators (KPIs) and compare production activity from different sites.
Because all this activity is essential to Lion Nathan’s output, each server on which these systems run is backed up continuously by ShadowProtect Server, which takes an image of all operating systems, applications and data every 60 minutes. This ensures that no more than 60 minutes’ data can be lost in the event of a server crash, and the server is back online quickly.
As well as using the above technologies, the XXXX Brewery in Brisbane uses Honeywell’s Experion distributed process control technology on HP servers. The Brewing control is done through Prolient.
Jim Duffy, IT Services Director, said “ShadowProtect is an important strategic choice for our Operational environment, given the ever-reducing tolerance for downtime”.
Sandy Pennisi, Desktop Services Leader, Queensland said that a major server crash could cost Lion Nathan up to $30,000 an hour in lost production.
“Fortunately, ShadowProtect allows us to restore a crashed server in about 20 minutes,” he said. “It’s quick and easy - the most important part is having all the drivers for a new server handy. If they are, restoring a server is even quicker than 20 minutes.”
“Using our previous backup tool, it was taking four hours to restore a server,” he said. “If we lost a machine it had to be rebuilt manually, then we had to retrieve data from the tape. Often this took considerably longer than four hours.
ShadowProtect is protecting all of Lion Nathan’s operational servers in Australia and New Zealand, including those at remote sites. As well as SCADA operations, these include file servers, print servers, virus servers. At XXXX, servers also run security cameras and general security. The XXXX site backs up about 1.6TB of information, while larger breweries like Tooheys in Sydney back up around 7-8TB.
At present, Lion Nathan has licensed more than 250 copies of StorageCraft, and seven ShadowProtect IT Editions. According to Sandy, the IT Editions are used mainly for restoring PCs with crashed disk drives, or for those that simply will not boot up. He says ShadowProtect IT restores a PC in about half an hour.
“ShadowProtect will restore a server to the same machine, a different one, or even a virtual environment. Recently we lost a 30GB partition on a DL380GI server and restored it to a desktop PC. I have not seen anything that ShadowProtect can’t do,” he said.
Sandy also has a good word for ShadowProtect support. When another brewery had initial problems, he contacted local supplier XSI, one of StorageCraft’s channel partners in Brisbane. The StorageCraft Asia Pacific support team were able to reproduce the issue and resolved it quickly.
“We were raving about how quickly and efficiently it was all resolved. It is great to see a vendor invest in Australian-based support infrastructure to help ensure that in the rare event that a problem develops, it can be solved quickly and professionally,” said Sandy. “StorageCraft delivers an excellent value proposition for protecting our SCADA, Telemetry and Windows™ servers – it really has eliminated the cost, the complexity and the pain of backing up our critical systems.”
About StorageCraft
StorageCraft Technology Corporation provides innovative disk-based backup, disaster recovery, system migration, data protection and security solutions for servers, desktops and laptops. StorageCraft delivers software products that reduce downtime, improve security and stability for systems and data and lower the total cost of ownership for servers, desktops and laptops. www.storagecraft.com.au/INFO
For more information
Sandy PennisiDesktop Service LeaderQueenslandLion TechnologyXXXX BreweryDirect: +617 3361 7506 Mobile: +61 (0) 409 726 397
Greg WymanStorageCraft Regional Director Asia Pacific
Phone: +612-9929 9770 or mobile +61(0) 402 259 359
Email: Greg.Wyman@storagecraft.com.au
David FrostPR DeadlinesPhone: +612-4341 5021 or mobile +61(0) 408 408 210
Email: davidf@prdeadlines.com.au