Operational Technology (OT) Network Refresh for Large Mining Site in WA

A large mining site in Western Australia had experienced multiple outages over a period of three months, setting the company back upwards of $10M dollars in lost production time. Progility Technologies (Progility) was engaged to go to the site and conduct a thorough audit to identify issues with the network. The issues were then tracked back to the outages in the enterprise network that the process control systems were connected to.  

Progility was then engaged to design, deploy and commission a new Extreme Fabric dual data centre high availability design, with connectivity to new access layer industrial networks and implemented a new HA IT/OT Firewall layer for providing an IT/OT DMZ. 

As part of the commissioning of the new high availability (HA) network, Progility was required to do extensive SAT testing to prove the new network was reliable and didn’t suffer the same reconvergence issues of the previous IT network (having reconvergence events that lasted up to 30 seconds.) 

The High availability of the fabric was tested with multiple failures from testing fibre failing to full switch failures and all failures met the customers SLA of 350ms recovery with a typical recovery of 100ms to support the SCADA system that runs on servers connected in both data centres.   

Progility has a proven track record in mining environments. Our technology experts understand the unique challenges and pain points in mining and work with our customers to tailor solutions that meet performance and operational objectives while adhering to regulations and required legislation. 

How our solution fulfilled the customer’s requirements