PROFILE
City Utilities Department
150,000 Residents
21 MGD Water Distribution System
ENVIRONMENT
Marathon everRun FT™ Software
WINDOWS APPLICATION
Wonderware® InTouch®

THE COMPANY
The City of Santa Rosa, California Utilities Department controls water distribution for approximately 150,000 residents using Wonderware® InTouch® control software protected by Marathon’s everRun FT™ software. Santa Rosa’s system includes 605 miles of potable water pipeline that fill 20 enclosed reservoirs with a storage capacity of 19.45 million gallons. The city’s average water usage is 21 million gallons per day (MGD) with a summer peak average of 33 MGD and a winter flow average of 13 MGD.

THE ENVIRONMENT
Using Wonderware software, employees optimise system operations by adjusting set–points, monitoring equipment performance, as well as managing time–fuse for pumping schedules to maintain reservoir levels. InTouch detects pump station/reservoir intrusion and monitors process alarms.

The control system features redundant unmanned control centers – operators access the control system from their vehicles using wireless technology. "Water is a basic need," said Paul Doroff, Department of Technology Coordinator, City of Santa Rosa. "We needed to eliminate any interruptions in water distribution services to our residents."

THE REQUIREMENTS
The Santa Rosa Utilities Department needed a simple, cost–effective way to protect its critical water distribution control system from downtime due to faults, failures and disasters. The protection system needed to eliminate three particularly costly downtime scenarios:
1. Downtime during a water main break. Control system downtime could delay response to water main breaks potentially causing interruption of service, flooding, and other costly consequences.
2. Interruption of electricity usage optimisation. Downtime for the control system could interrupt a cost–saving electricity optimisation function that saves electric costs by running pumps when electricity is less expensive.
3. Downtime during natural disasters. Because Santa Rosa is located in an earthquake–prone area, the control system needs to be protected from earthquake, landslide, and other natural disasters that could interrupt water distribution when it is critically needed.

THE SOLUTION
The City of Santa Rosa, along with its control system consulting firm EMA, chose Marathon’s everRun FT software–based system to meet the City’s fault and disaster tolerance requirements. "The Marathon solution was simple, cost effective and provided a higher level of protection than any other solution we looked at," said Mitch Dobson, Senior Consultant, EMA, Inc.
The everRun FT software runs two identical Windows servers in lockstep so they function as a single, fully redundant Windows server. If one server stops running due to fault, failure or disaster, the InTouch control software continues to operate uninterrupted using the computing power of the other server. EMA purchased, installed and configured the everRun FT software quickly and easily.

THE RESULTS
Since the successful completion of the Santa Rosa project, EMA and Marathon continue to work together using Marathon’s unique redundant control systems platform at other water and wastewater facilities. "By making our control system continuously available, we can deploy our operations staff to the locations where they are needed around the city," said John Joyner, Senior Manager, City of Santa Rosa. "The cost savings resulting from this efficient use of staff resources paid for the Marathon software in a short time frame."

"The cost savings resulting from efficient use of staff resources paid for the Marathon software in a short time frame."