MES backup and recovery strategies

An MES system typically consists of real time and historical data. The backup and recovery strategy described here focuses on the historical data in an MES system environment.

A typical environment consists of:

• Real time connections to the plant floor (System Platform Application Server)

• Process Data Historian (AVEVA Historian)

• Operator Displays (AVEVA System Platform OMI or AVEVA InTouch HMI)

• Report Portal (AVEVA BI Gateway)

• SQL Server MES database

• A backup and recovery strategy must ensure that you can recover from a catastrophic failure in a timely manner. Any strategy must weigh the costs against the associated risks. The information in this chapter provides a balanced approach with reasonable costs and limited system downtime.

Before you design your backup and recovery strategy, consider the following recommendations:

• In systems where production continues regardless of the status of MES (e.g., switching to manual data collection), any strategy will result in a loss of information. This is called lack-of-service data loss.

• Implement truncation of transaction logs as part of the backup strategy to minimize the amount of storage they use.

• The more data you try to recover, the longer it will take to recover.

• You should design your backup and recovery strategy with an estimated time to recovery from a Standard and Disaster scenario.

  • The Standard scenario is typical when you have all backup media on hand and only need to restore the data.

  • Disaster recovery means all on‑site equipment and information is lost.

• People must be trained, available, and willing to use the recovery strategy. System administrators are often more concerned with getting the system up and running than with restoring all the data. Once they have restored the last full backup, they might not want to use the Differential or Transaction log backup.

• The database size impacts the backup and recovery time in a production environment. Therefore an archive strategy should be considered to keep the online MES production database at an acceptable size.

• It is a good practice to have a test environment. Not only can it be used as an interim production system in the event a disaster occurring, it can be used to test the recovery plan.

Backup and recovery strategy components

A backup and recovery strategy is composed of the following components:

• Complete list of software installed per server, including versions and patch levels

• Strategy for handling Windows updates, software updates, and application updates

• Licenses backup

• Archiving plan (archiving is part of backup and recovery)

• Application Deployment Guide that describes how to install the system from the source media and backups

• Backup plan, including system configuration and process data

• Recovery plan and recovery tests

• Off-site storage plan (backup media should be taken off site and rotated)

• Security requirements of the users administering the plan and the security of the data; this includes encrypting the database backups