Redundancy in GENESIS

Redundancy is a system architecture strategy that seeks to improve the resiliency of the system as a whole. When using redundancy in an architecture, you are typically adding multiple servers configured to share certain responsibilities. It can help eliminate single points of failure in a design, as well as improve data integrity of the application.

Key Benefits

  • High Availability: Redundancy helps maintain uninterrupted operations, even during hardware or software outages. Isolated failures of certain components can occur without impacting the overall function of the system.
  • Automatic Failover and Recovery: If a primary server or node becomes unavailable, a secondary (back-up) machine automatically takes over.

  • Real-Time Data Synchronization: Secondary servers are continuously updated and ready to activate instantly.

Redundancy is a core capability of GENESIS. You can set up duplicate servers and nodes that operate in parallel. If a primary machine becomes unavailable, its back-up counterpart takes over, minimizing downtime and preventing data loss.

Basic Terminology

  • Active Server: The server that is currently performing the tasks assigned to the cluster. There is always only one active server in the cluster, although all servers can be online.
  • Primary Server: The first (top-most) server configured in the redundancy cluster box. Information about the primary server is used in certain redundancy modes.
  • Back-Up/Secondary Server: Any server in a cluster that is not set as the primary server.
  • Failover: The event when the active server in a cluster fails, and all communication and operations that were previously running on the active server transfer to one of the back-up servers, thereby making it the new active server. The failover behavior settings are customized for each cluster.
  • Heartbeat: Data point that indicates the health and function of a service. It is monitored by Redundancy to detect a loss of service that should trigger a failover.
  • Cluster: Group of servers that are responsible for a certain action. Some components of GENESIS support redundancy only as a two-node cluster (such as Data Historian or Alarm Server), while other components, such as FrameWorX or OPC UA, support an unlimited number of servers in a cluster.
  • Sub-Cluster: Set of redundant nodes for a certain sub-set of points in FrameWorX redundancy, such as an individual point manager. While FrameWorX clusters automatically monitor the system health and fail over according to the status of the FrameWorX service, the sub-cluster configurations allow failovers for specific services.

To set up redundancy, parallel servers or nodes must be available, connected, and properly configured in Workbench.

Select one of the following links to learn more about the configuration: