Case Study: Pinellas County Utilities achieves continuous, no-downtime SCADA virtualization with Stratus Technologies

Virtualizing Critical WONDERWARE AUTOMATION SOLUTIONS With Confidence

Pinellas County Utilities (FL) supplies 71 million gallons of drinking water and treats 30 million gallons of wastewater daily for over a million residents and millions of visitors, managing thousands of miles of pipe and hundreds of field devices. Facing a shrinking tax base, funding cuts and staffing pressures, the utility needed a more resilient, cost-effective SCADA platform to monitor some 20,000 objects and ensure zero downtime for public health and safety.

PCU virtualized its Wonderware SCADA environment using VMware on Stratus ftServer systems and a thin‑client architecture across three geographically dispersed controller sites, consolidating key services (InTouch, Object Server, Historian, Terminal Services, etc.) on fault‑tolerant virtual machines. The result: simplified operations, centralized remote access, stronger security, faster deployment of new apps, lower cost and implementation time versus clustered servers, 24/7 support and no unscheduled downtime.

Pinellas County Utilities

Ken Osborne

SCADA supervisor