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Minnesota D.O.T. Turns to Asentria for a Flexible Monitoring Solution
Minnesota Transportation Department revamps their communications network with Asentria devices.
For an idea of the demands that population growth will place on Minnesota’s road system, consider the following statistics: In 2006, the Minnesota metro district’s population, which includes the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, totaled almost 3 million. By 2030, this region is expected to add another 1 million people, generating 15 million trips per day and 86 million vehicle-miles traveled per day, a 51 percent increase from 2000 to 2030.
The Challenge
For many years, Minnesota state agencies such as the State Police or the D.O.T. operated their command and control structure over separate communications networks, often with little to no interoperability. The lack of a unified, scalable communications network that state agencies could use to coordinate their responses to emergencies was cited as a major target of reform by the Minnesota State Government.
The challenge facing the lawmakers was one of funding the replacement of an antiquated patchwork of communication networks with a secure, voice network that could grow along with the state’s transportation system. With the Federal Communication Commission’s mandate that all entities utilizing “wide-band” VHF and UHF systems move to “narrow-band” systems by 2013 the Minnesota State Legislature responded by funding an 800MHz P25 Trunked Radio Communication System.
The Office of Communications within MNDOT set out evaluating the state’s current systems and began design of the required additions to bring all state agencies together onto a common communications platform. Due to the high degree of importance placed on the reliability of an emergency communications network, one of the steps was to find a company with an established track record of delivering remote monitoring and control solutions to ensure that the network and its equipment would function properly.
The Solution
Asentria was chosen to monitor two important items at the tower sites: environmental conditions (generators, smoke detectors, lights, building entries, AC & DC power) and the LAN/WAN backbone equipment. The remote site monitoring solution Asentria delivered to MNDOT included the SNMP-link SL-81 - and it’s successor, the SiteBoss 530. Featuring a Cisco router at each tower site for connectivity, Asentria’s remote site monitoring solution sends polling and alarm traffic via SNMP across the network to a central NOC. This is then fed into an in-house NMS system.
The Asentria unit’s powerful control capabilities allow personnel to remotely send commands to enable or disable power plants and relay switches; change equipment configuration parameters; connect remote users to restricted ports; collect, buffer and securely transfer data; and more.
In addition, Asentria solutions have not only helped make MNDOT’s network more reliable by enabling it to keep track of environmental conditions that could potentially pose a threat to its remote equipment, but have also proven to be highly flexible and customizable.
Asentria recently sat down with Dave Klema, a member of MNDOT’s Electronic Communication Division, and author of the “SMART” NMS system, to get more information on this new and exciting application of Asentria products:
Q: Dave, can you give us a general overview of the project and what role Asentria units were asked to play?
A: Sure. The Office of Electronic Communications (OEC) is tasked with maintaining public safety radio communications for state agencies in Minnesota. For the past 50 years, each separate government agency, such as the Minn. State Patrol, Dept. of Natural Resources, MNDOT, etc., has had their own radio system to communicate among their employees. More recently though, the FCC has mandated that all entities convert to, no later than 2013, a narrow-band communication systems.
With regards to Minnesota, the decision was made to migrate the separate state agencies over to a single Motorola trunked digital radio system. This system had several advantages, including the ability to interconnect all of the state agencies into an efficient, simultaneous-use environment. The Minnesota State Government also offers partnership use of the communications system to local entities such as police, fire, and emergency services.
MNDOT owns and maintains the backbone of the state radio system, consisting of 350+ tower sites, each a distance of 15 to 20 miles apart, and spread across the entire state. Between these tower sites, OEC maintains a WAN system of microwave radios. The digital radio service initially exceeded the required 95% state territory coverage. Due to additional requirements though, the new mandate specified 95% of county coverage, resulting in additional tower site construction.
Asentria was chosen to monitor two important items at the tower sites: environmental conditions (generators, smoke detectors, lights, building entries, AC & DC power) and the LAN/WAN backbone equipment. Due to support and cost issues, OEC decided to build the Asentria-led monitoring and control network outside of the existing Motorola network. Featuring a Cisco router at each tower site for connectivity, Asentria units are able to monitor and report through the partially-meshed system of shared T1 and microwave connectivity.
Q: What were the particular features of the Asentria unit that you found were essential for your project?
A: The SCADA system currently in place in greater Minnesota has 12 inputs, and one of the major requirements for the new system was digital contact inputs. The Motorola SCADA system that is tasked with monitoring the metro area has 48 digital inputs – something OEC needed to maintain with any new system to replace these legacy SCADA systems. The second requirement was a monitoring system that was SNMP-capable. Finally, the unit had to have a high degree of modularity – it had to be able to grow with the system. After an exhaustive search, we determined that Asentria units were the best fit given these requirements. We were especially impressed with the unit’s card-slotting capability. With up to 6 available slots (depending on the model), OEC had the freedom to customize a solution in a way that made sense for us. So that was extremely important and really made the decision an easy one given the Asentria unit’s capabilities.
Q: When did it become clear that the Asentria solution was going to be a fit for your project?
A: Well, I have been familiar with Asentria for about 6-7 years, back when they were still Omnitronix. At this time, I was doing some amount of research into the remote site monitoring space. What stood out when I contacted Asentria was the level of support the company delivered, even before we bought a single unit. After speaking with Rick Freeman (Asentria Account Executive), we were sent an evaluation unit, which we then submitted to extensive testing. It seemed like no matter what we asked for, there was an Asentria person willing to spend the time either explaining the features and answering the questions, or were willing to take our comments and incorporate them into future iterations of the unit. It was this level of personal attention that really sold us on Asentria.
Q: Are there any other features, in addition to the SNMP trap capability, that you find valuable?
A: The other nice thing we like about the Asentria units is the web interface, so if the techs don’t want to connect to the NMS server, they can use the web interface to get input statuses, etc. There is a lot the box can do, up to and including seamless integration with proprietary software applications. I designed a network monitoring application called “SMART” (Site Monitoring and Alarm Reporting Tool), that every 15-20 seconds polls the status of each digital input. Because of the inherent outages in the LAN system, sometimes a trap can get lost when the network goes down. The robust multi-threaded environment of the SMART system helps eliminate these lost traps through the continuous poll requests. After SMART gets a “no response” after a user configurable number of polls, it switches that input to an unknown state and alerts the necessary individuals that something is wrong.
But what we especially liked with the Asentria units was that even if you didn’t have a SMART system, you could still pull the unit out of the packing material and begin to forward traps in a matter of minutes, through an out-of-the-box SNMP trap application. It can forward alerts to email, pager, text, you name it. This was especially important as an interim solution, prior to the SMART system deployment. Right away we were up and collecting trap data, without the hassle of a complicated setup or extensive hardware commitments.
Q: What feature of the SiteBoss unit did you like the best?
A: Right now we are using the SiteBoss 530, and we really like the modular slot card inputs. You can pull cards out, put new ones in and really spread out your resources based on need, without worrying about technology going to waste. Also the ease of programming is very nice compared with some of the other devices we work with on the system. I’m a bit of a “command line” guy, as are the other people that work with the units, and the simple command prompt interface is much appreciated. I know with other company’s boxes we use you have to grab the manual just to use the command line. With Asentria, it’s pretty evident when you Telnet into the unit what you’re looking at and what you need to do. To be honest, we don’t even use a whole lot of the other features that come with this box – but what we do use works pretty well.
And that’s the nice thing about this box. When I show it to coworkers, they’re surprised at it’s level of sophistication. It can send emails, you can buy a card and have it wirelessly dial out, etc. When I made the business case to purchase these units, I told my superiors what we need and what it was going to cost, but I also mentioned some of the other capabilities of the unit. For example, we can put it at a site, and if we don’t have it connected back to the Network Manager yet, we can trench in a phone line and hook it up that way. That flexibility helped me in designing the system and presenting the plans to my superiors.
Q: What part of the Asentria experience have you found to be the most rewarding?
A: Hard to define, but the customer service and support is about the best I have worked with. Some of the other vendors I’ve used, you have to call into a phone tree and then you’re forced to open up a help ticket. With Asentria, you connect directly to the person that can handle your problem, saving you overhead in the long run. I wish more companies were like that.
Q: Would you recommend Asentria solutions to others?
A: Yes I would and I have. When you deal with Asentria, you’re going to get the quotes that you need, they’re going to tell you what it can do and they’re going to make it work for you. And the success of our project is proof that the Asentria solution isn’t just smoke and mirrors.
Q: What is it you’re doing right now that is new and what is your end goal of the Asentria units?
A: We are replacing our legacy management system and what we’re doing is taking what we learned from our MNDOT SCADA system, the Motorola NMS system, and an HP Openview system. Our SCADA system we bought 20 years ago. The interface didn’t work like the company said it would so a guy in our office wrote a new interface that worked great. So when we started looking into a new system, that was a feature that we wanted to have in place – the ability to modify the application as needed. I had to teach myself the C# language before I could write the SMART NMS software code. And it was a challenge when you look at 350 sites polling over 40 inputs,that is thousands and thousands of polls. So in writing the SMART application (Site Monitoring and Alarm Reporting Tool), it quickly became apparent that polling the inputs of the Asentria units in a linear manner wasn’t the best way to go. SMART was written with multi-threaded capabilities so that the thousands of inputs can be polled in a matter of minutes instead of hours. I had a lot of help from Asentria in determining what to poll, the settings, etc.
The end goal is setting up a system to provide 24 hour support for our sites. With Asentria units, the out-of-band network, and the SMART application, we will a watchful eye on every detail of the system. And we can match against the radio system anything happening on the network, so if a trooper has problems using his radio we can confirm that through the monitoring and reporting features. MNDOT is charged with owning, maintaining, and operating a multi-million dollar system, so the ultimate goal is to have the clarity and insight to respond to any issues in the system.
Q; Do you feel this could be a model for other DOTs around the country?
A: Yes, We decided to build our own system but others don’t have to. We found this worthwhile because when you build it yourself you will understand it on a fundamental level and how to maintain it, and two, the Asentria support is there to back up the product.
The Company
Asentria develops remote site monitoring and telemanagement solutions that enable providers of critical communications infrastructure to more efficiently and reliably run their networks. Asentria’s products help ensure quality of service and lower operational costs, while making it easier to provision, maintain and support remote equipment. Our strategic solutions fit both large and small communication networks and provide high-value, cost-effective and competitive differentiators to our customers.
Asentria helps administrators cost-effectively manage their call reporting data and remote site infrastructure, while extending confidence and security to ensure availability, integrity and performance. Asentria enables administrators to avoid failures from poor performing equipment that threaten end-user service expectations, while providing better control to predict the performance of remote infrastructure. These new levels of protection shield end-users from remote site equipment failure. Our service provider and enterprise customers trust their remote equipment sites to Asentria. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.
