On November 6th, 2019, Cirrus Link Solutions’ President, Arlen Nipper (co-inventor of MQTT), conducted a webinar on MQTT Server Environments. The webinar, titled “How to Create a Secure, Redundant, Highly Available MQTT Environment”, is the 3rd in a series and addressed best practices in using MQTT, defined how to configure the Chariot MQTT Server, and included a live demonstration. Who better to step you through the architectural concepts of security and high availability models using MQTT, than the co-inventor of the protocol? 

Cirrus Link Solutions has over 75 combined years of experience in MQTT environments. We are one of only two strategic partners to Inductive Automation who created the Ignition platform. We have worked on countless projects and are very familiar with the challenges companies face. The Inductive Automation /Cirrus Link Solutions provides a modular approach to building Enterprise-Class IIOT/SCADA/MES applications. The webinar is our way of demonstrating how your enterprise can easily connect OT data to IT services for big data analytics with superior results. 

Establishing a superior MQTT server and edge computing environment involves understanding how your IIOT/SCADA/MES applications will perform during a catastrophic event. Your architecture must provide redundancy which quickly handles disruptions without severe data loss. The redundancy concepts and components addressed by Arlen Nipper in this webinar are essential to ensuring your architecture choices provide optimal data up-time. 

Breaking down each component to gain a better understanding of your overall and individual data transfer needs is what this webinar provides. Using the Cirrus Link Solutions MQTT Modules and the Ignition Platform, multiple MQTT architecture components are explained as they relate to an enterprise’s complex data needs. In a SCADA operational environment, the ability to remove hard-coding and decouple field devices from any one application using MQTT the publish and subscribe middleware reduces bandwidth up to 80-90%. 

Accomplishing real-time, secure cloud data storage and transfer in a highly available redundant architecture greatly decreases the effects of a catastrophic event. A properly designed Ignition gateway, MQTT server and edge device infrastructure provides redundancy throughout. The placement of the MQTT servers and connected edge devices within your infrastructure is unlimited and simple to configure, which creates a truly redundant solution. If one MQTT server or connection goes down, the system automatically switches to the next and the next, with minimal to no data loss due to store and forward capabilities. 

In typical SCADA systems you must know from hundreds if not up to thousands of port numbers and firewall rules, making recovery from a catastrophic event even more difficult. MQTT leverages TCP/IP technology to accomplish security through remote originated connections. This eliminates the need for knowing the IP address of the connected devices and the MQTT protocol sits on top of the existing TCP/IP technology. Recovery takes place within the MQTT server architecture and messages are not lost, simply re-routed. 

In the live demo, Arlen demonstrates how simple it is to configure the Chariot MQTT server. He shows the versatility of the MQTT Server architecture, how to enable servers/tags, and set up secure connections. Remember, the set-up includes auto-discovery, so when enabling a MQTT host client like Ignition, you can watch the nodes, sessions and tags load in real-time. He further provides a real-time catastrophic event and explains how the system reroutes, immediately. 

For all your MQTT server architecture and edge computing network needs, Cirrus Link Solutions is your best choice. Our CTO, Arlen Nipper, is the co-founder/inventor of the protocol that makes IIOT a reality today. Feel free to watch the webinar and contact us to discuss how the Chariot MQTT server and Ignition Sparkplug components and modules can decrease bandwidth improve security and redundancy in your SCADA system.

For more information feel free to visit our website or contact us directly Cirrus Link at 844-924-7787 or sales@cirrus-link.com

 #MQTT, #SCADA, #IIoT, #CloudComputing