versiondog on the Trial of Big Bang

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Backup & Recovery

Backing up and monitoring of Industrial control system programs for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, the world´s largest particle accelerator, has been entrusted to the data management system versiondog. The European Organization for Nuclear Research uses the system to manage the data of around 500 components, making versiondog one of CERN's standard technologies.

CERN

CERN - looking deeply into matter CERN was founded in 1954 as a research organisation for fundamental physics. It is located at Meyrin near Geneva. A remarkable international collaboration, the European Organization for Nuclear Research is now run by 22

The LHC was commissioned in 2008 to carry out cutting-edge research into particle physics. versiondog from AUVESY is the leading manufacturer-independent software solution for backup, version control and documentation of project data for industrial control systems. It uses standardised workflow and centralised data storage, makes automatic backups and ensures easily comprehensible documentation of each step in the development process. The SmartCompare function enables detailed program comparison with the same familiar presentation as the system editor. Support is provided for audit trail documentation in accordance with ISO 900x, VDA 6.x, FDA 21 CFR 11, GAMP and GMP.

versiondog has been in use at CERN for a year. There is now a centralised repository where the project data of the control systems from Siemens (SIMATIC S7, TIA Portal, WinCC flexible) and Schneider Electric (Unity Pro) is safeguarded and managed. "We want to make all the processes of the control system and their surrounding ancillary equipment homogeneous," says Ortolá. "Our goal is to always have a clear overview of all PLCs and HMIs and all the changes that are made to their control programs. We want to be able to manage all program versions using a standardised procedure, and it is extremely important to us to be able to store and safeguard data centrally. versiondog helps us do that."

• [Management Effectiveness - Operation Transparency]
  Management of the various individual processes and control systems is the responsibility of a number of different departments. Within this structure, Ortolá's department provides CERN wide support service. It was with the goal of standardising processes across departments in mind that the versiondog system was introduced. Staff now have a much clearer picture of processes and their current status. Any and all changes are comprehensible and visible to everyone. And they can be undone if necessary. Furthermore, a backup of all data is performed once a week.
• [Efficiency Improvement - R&D]
  "Errors made while modifying programs have been reduced to an absolute minimum since we have been using versiondog," explains Ortolá. "Centralised data storage guarantees that we are always working with the latest and most recently approved and released program versions." But if for some reason a system goes down, the latest version is immediately available. What’s more, the system checks that the version running on a control system (the online version) really does correspond to the latest version that was saved on the server (the offline version). Before versiondog, changes could go unnoticed. Regular online-offline comparisons ensure that this can no longer happen. If a discrepancy is detected, the system informs the appropriate administrator by email. All this means that versiondog has led to an improvement in quality and an increase in the level of work process standardisation at CERN.

• Research and development in a facility such as CERN never comes to an end. Ortolá is continually adapting the versiondog system to the changing needs of the Organization. When he needs support, he gets it directly from the data management specialists AUVESY. There he can find the help he needs with individual elements of configuration and with broader adaptations of the system to new conditions.
• Ortolá sums up: "versiondog makes it possible for us at CERN to safeguard our control system data and store it centrally, which is a crucial element for the Organization."