Alstom taps SteelEye for Beijing Metro Line
Written by William C. Vantuono, Editor-in-ChiefSteelEye Technology, Inc. announced Monday that Alstom Transport had selected the company to deploy SteelEye® LifeKeeper® for Linux to protect mission-critical applications of the maintenance system services for Beijing Metro Line 2. The deployment will “control and manage high availability and potential faults to ensure the continuous availability of maintenance services for the Chinese capital’s two essential metro lines,” the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company said.
SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux ensures the continuous availability of applications and data by creating a fault resilient environment for virtual machines, and also monitors applications to ensure that any fault is automatically detected and rectified while maintaining uninterrupted services.
“We implemented SteelEye LifeKeeper for its simplicity of use and its efficiency,” said Maurice Guizard, R&D manager for Alstom Urbalis platform centralized maintenance. “High availability is key for the maintenance ofmodern transport systems. As there isn’t much staff on the ground to understand and take action, an efficient centralized system needs to be available. With LifeKeeper, our software applications and databases are centralized and managed 24/7 to ensure that an alert will be sent to the most skilled individual to resolve an issue.”
SteelEye LifeKeeper guarantees continuous operations of the Alstom maintenance system reaching a 99.995% uptime rate for business critical maintenance applications, the company says. Failover capabilities provide a service window for maintenance to be conducted on the first server while the second server continues to operate, which means Alstom can plan for a maximum downtime of only two minutes. It also enables fault diagnostics to be sent remotely to operators.
