June 16, 2014 - SoftPLC announces SoftPLC Hot Standby for systems that cannot easily tolerate downtime due to single points of failure. The Hot Standby system uses both hardware and software components to create a control system with redundant PACs, capable of interfacing to a wide variety of I/O devices. This can lead to an increased level of reliability, by providing operational redundancy with "bumpless" transfer of I/O control between SoftPLC CPU's if a control switchover failure related event occurs. A SoftPLC Hot Standby system consists of:
- (2) SoftPLC controllers, identically configured and using ethernet remote I/O (hardware component)
- (2) SoftPLC Hot Standby loadable firmware modules (software component installed in each SoftPLC Controller)
- (1) SoftPLC Arbitrator (Cat No SPZ-HSA).
This is a "dumb" device which functions as a pass-through (or block) for the communications from the two SoftPLC CPUs to the remote I/O.
The Arbitrator ensures that only one unit will be able to control the I/O.