Barix IP Control Solutions Form the Nucleus of Critical Systems Monitoring for Oceanic Time Warner of Hawaii

Barix AG, a pioneer in IP-based audio, intercom, control, and monitoring, today announced that Oceanic Time Warner, a division of Time Warner Cable serving the Hawaiian islands, is using Barix Barionet IP control devices to monitor more than 1500 digital and analog signals from critical equipment at 18 locations around Hawaii. Headquartered in Mililani on the island of Oahu, Oceanic Time Warner offers residential and business services for cable TV, digital phone, and high-speed and wireless internet access. The solution allows Oceanic Time Warner to efficiently and reliably monitor the health of electrical and HVAC equipment at its multiple distribution facilities from a central location through the power of the IP environment. Oceanic Time Warner engineers pull various status readings and alarm notifications from critical air-conditioning, incoming utility line, UPS and back-up generator systems using multiple Barix Barionet devices connected to a single, wide-area network. According to Mark Melville, Communications Engineer at Oceanic Time Warner, a mixture of business value and technical reliability made the Barionet an ideal solution to form the signal monitoring nucleus within his new networked system. Melville also cited the ability of the Barionet to communicate with both legacy analog and digital systems as highly valuable to the operation. “In 2006, we clearly identified the need and the value in monitoring various points within our distribution system and to trend these over time. Such data provides a valuable benchmark and helps predict the health of current operations,” said Melville. “The cost-efficiency of the Barix products and the ease of integration provided exceptional business value, and technically the Barionet has proved to be an excellent edge monitoring tool that provides time stamps for critical events and helps to place the pieces together following a system outage.” “The flexibility of the Barionet has provided exceptional value to our operation,” said Melville. “The majority of our devices are legacy and do not support SNMP, and the Barionet is ideal for interfacing with these systems. However, even systems that support both SNMP/contact closure and analog test points have been wired as well to provide redundant monitoring via standard SNMP and the Barionet.” DataNab, an IP systems programmer and Barix distributor based in Burnsville, Minnesota, programmed and delivered the system to Oceanic Time Warner’s specifications. The complete Barionet solution interfaces with InduSoft Web Studio to log and graphically display information from the monitored points, recall system trends, and generate e-mail alarm notifications. The Barionets also redundantly log data in the event that the link between the devices and the InduSoft server is broken. DataNab programmed each Barionet to query up to 72 monitoring points (contact closures, 0-5Vdc analog points and temperature sensors). DataNab extended the native capability of the devices by connecting multiple DataNab Ai32 modules to every Barionet in the system, with each Ai32 adding an additional 32 monitored channels. DataNab also developed a set of configuration pages hosted by the Barionets to allow the user to configure sensor types, names and alarm conditions for each point through a standard web browser. Based upon these user definitions, each Barionet generates a customized status webpage to show the conditions of all 72 points in real-time. According to Adam VanOort, President of DataNab, the ability to monitor the health of so many critical systems from any networked location eliminates the need for Melville and his team to travel to the remote facilities on a regular basis. “The Barionet is a very valuable edge monitoring solution for Oceanic Time Warner as it is fairly difficult and time consuming to travel between sites among the different islands,” said VanOort. “It’s much more efficient to monitor and control their equipment over the network, and when possible, to remotely diagnose problems and make necessary changes as well.” Melville also requested an alarming feature within the Barionet to enable faster response times to critical issues and system failures. The result is that the Barionet forwards specific alarm conditions containing the component name and alarm trigger to the central server, allowing Melville and his team to respond accordingly and repair the problems over the network when possible. Individual thresholds for alarming can be seamlessly changed on the fly to address changing conditions within the system. Melville plans to evaluate an expansion of monitoring applications for the Barionet in the future. Possible applications include monitoring electrical current on a per-circuit basis, resetting edge devices through power cycles, and measuring line pressure and temperature of air conditioning systems at the compressor and evaporator. All Barix products are inexpensive, low-power devices that are scalable to the growth of the operation; offer reliability through a PC-FREE design with no moving parts; and serve as a flexible platform for integration into virtually any operation requiring audio transport and delivery. Barix also offers its programmable BCL standard open to all customers to easily tailor applications for specific needs. Local control, audio relay, and low-latency streaming are a few examples of custom programs using Barix’s BCL software environment.