Data Center SCADA

Summary

A client required a Data Center SCADA system to monitor and control multiple data halls, system alarming, redundancy, and data collection for a new datacenter. Utilizing Ignition Perspective 8.1 by Inductive Automation, we were able to develop a Data Center SCADA system that achieves all the client’s requirements along with extra features we have seen utilized at other facilities. The SCADA project monitored building load, water control systems, electrical control systems, and HVAC systems, and implemented historical data, trend viewing, alarm notifications, and MQTT data collection.

Approach

A datacenter was being built and needed a Data Center SCADA system to manage device connections, data collection through MQTT, and system monitoring. This system needed to fulfill the following requirements:

1. Alarm Control with custom alarm properties.
2. MQTT data collection with read only access.
3. Data collection for trend viewing utilizing an SQL database.
4. Alarm historian utilizing an SQL database.
5. Separate IO gateways for 5 individual data halls.
6. Redundancy for each IO gateway.
7. Front-end gateway, with redundancy, connected to each IO gateway.
8. Easy to scale with more data halls, more devices, or other possible future expansions.
9. All gateway traffic must use SSL for enhanced security.
10. Alarm notifications over SMS and email.

Utilizing the scalability and flexibility of Ignition Perspective by Inductive Automation, the SCADA system was designed, meeting all criteria along with extra features including mobile access and audit logging. Maskine worked with the commissioning teams to develop a SCADA system that could achieve all criteria. To accomplish this, the development was broken up into 3 tasks.

The first task was to set up the Ignition gateways. Initially, Maskine created Master-Backup redundancy pairs between the IO gateways, the front-end gateway, the MQTT gateway, and their respective backup gateways. Once redundancy was set up on each gateway, connections between the IO gateways and front-end gateway were created. Utilizing remote tag providers, the front-end gateway accessed the IO gateway tags. After creating the remote providers, SQL database connections were made for alarming, audit log, and historical data. The PLC connections and other equipment connections were established on the IO gateways.

The second task was to build the HMI. This involved creating templates for each field device type including, but not limited to, pumps, chillers, and analog / digital IO. To avoid future issues with colors, fonts, or other aesthetic choices, style classes were implemented to standardize these visuals. Once the templates were created, each subsystem view was created implementing the templates for each field device type.  Once the subsystem views had been created, the HMI overview and navigation were created using Ignitions built-in components. Finally, alarms were created on UDT tags and connected to the Alarm Notification module.

The third and final task was MQTT. We first installed the MQTT Transmission module onto the IO gateways and created an SSL connection to the MQTT gateway. The MQTT Engine and MQTT Distributer modules were installed on the MQTT gateway and connected to a remote MQTT broker over the secured connection. Once all the MQTT transmitters were connected, Maskine created a dedicated MQTT tag provider on the IO gateways and utilized python scripts to generate reference tags pointing to the live HMI tag. This allowed a very flat tag structure for easier data collection parsing, forcing tags to read only access, and contains all the MQTT tags to a single tag provider per IO gateway. Finally, the MQTT tags were added to the IO gateways and MQTT gateway could send and receive data from the MQTT broker.

The developed SCADA system contained 500,000+ tags, 14 Ignition gateways, 7 subnets, 100+ device connections, and 240+ views.

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