SCADA :: Linux Makes Automation, Infrastructure Strides

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This, then, brings us to Verano, a Boston-based firm who's line of products is the kind of software that will manage the automation processes for manufacturing plants and utility companies in North America and Europe. This is a specialized kind of automation that must deal with controlling processes in real-time while (ideally) letting the enterprise side of the company have access to the data so that financial and business planning decisions can be formulated.

Verano has a lot of experience in this area, having produced software for commercial UNIX platforms to run in such corporations as Innogy, which manages 78 percent of the power needs for the United Kingdom. This is done with Verano's SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) platform, which allows plant managers, control workers, and company executives to fully access exactly what data and controls they need to keep all of the business humming along.

With this legacy fully in place, Verano has recently made the announcement that they have moved their SCADA software over to the GNU/Linux platform, which makes this the first time GNU/Linux has ever been used for such complex automation processes.

According to Pan Kamal, Verano's new product, Performux, is geared to run on Red Hat Advanced Server, and now opens the option of using Intel-based servers to run SCADA-type operations. Kamal, vice president of marketing at Verano, said that Performux is a natural progression for many of Verano's customers, since much of their control software runs on UNIX already.