Named for the county in Kentucky where it made its home in 1985, Logan Aluminum (a joint venture between Alcan Aluminum and Atlantic Richfield Company) employs well over a thousand people, and is the leading manufacturer of can body stock in the world. With its recently completed $22 million expansion, the Logan plant is aiming to improve on its 1999 aluminum sheet metal output of some 1.5 billion pounds.

Logan Aluminum employees strive to be the best at everything they do. So when faced with an upcoming replacement project for the existing Human Machine Interface software, Logan took the time to make sure that they found the best possible solution. During the course of the search, they discovered Microsoft's first Terminal Server operating system, Windows NT 4.0 TSE. The benefits that a Terminal Server system could bring to an industrial installation became clear after just a little research, and Logan began to believe that Thin Clients running on Microsoft Terminal Server would be perfect for this replacement. A Terminal Server installation sounded like it would make software maintenance much easier, but Logan needed to be convinced of the product's reliability before installing Thin Clients in the plant.

The Investigation

To truly evaluate the product with their MMI software, Logan decided to purchase a copy for evaluation. They loaded Windows NT 4.0 TSE onto an existing server and began testing it in their plant. To save money during the tests, and because they hadn’t researched any Thin Client hardware companies, other NT machines were initially used as clients to the server. The testing soon made it apparent that a Thin Client system would be a stable and capable platform for the MMI project.

The next step was to investigate a product from the company that is credited with starting the entire Thin Client revolution, Citrix. A copy of Citrix Metaframe for Windows NT was purchased and installed on the existing NT server, and Logan began exploring the benefits of this now enhanced Terminal Server installation. The addition of Citrix made the package even more suitable for their needs, but Logan was still using full Windows NT PCs as clients to the Windows Server. Running with Fat Clients was OK for testing, but Logan didn’t like the idea of still having to maintain multiple NT machines, even if they were only hosting the Thin Client sessions. So at this point the research was begun into possible sources for Thin Client hardware.

Intellution as a choice for the Human Machine Interface software was a given - it was already being used in the plant and, and the testing that had been done (which included the evaluation of several other products) made it clear that it was best for this installation. As Intellution had not yet released the Thin Client version of their software, Logan next had to investigate the suitability of their Intellution software on the TSE platform. At first, this seemed to be a losing battle. After talking with several firms about mixing Intellution with Thin Clients, no one seemed able to help. Then, while attending Intellution training in Atlanta, the discussion about running Intellution software under the Windows TSE operating system came up over lunch. It happened that one of the people at the table had seen the Intellution product running in a Thin Client system in the offices of a local company, Automation control Products (ACP).

When Logan personnel returned to Kentucky, they called back to Atlanta and started a dialog with ACP. A meeting was set and several Logan employees made the journey to Atlanta one more time to evaluate first hand what ACP had to offer. After seeing demonstrations of Intellution software running on ACP enabled Thin Clients, Logan finally had the assurance that the pieces of this project would come together as they had hoped. It was evident that ACP Enabled hardware and ThinManager management software (which was by far the best Software package that had seen) would be the perfect compliment for their Terminal Server. Said Charles Jennett of Logan Aluminum, "ThinManager was by far the best Software package we had seen. What really impressed us the most was the ease of replacing a terminal if it fails. After some discussion about our visit with ACP we opted to choose them as our product vendor."

The Installation

The Thin Client system was set up using 2 Compaq 6400R servers. These servers have dual 500 PIII Xeon processors, and each server had 1 GB of memory. One of the servers provides the operator interface screens to around 15 clients in Logan's Ingot Prep Area. When complete, the Thin Client hardware in this area will consist of a mix of Industrial and Desktop Thin Clients. The software for the interfaces running from this first server is written in Visual Basic. The second server will provide interfaces to about 15 clients in the Mill Area of the plant, and these interfaces will be running Intellution MMI software. All communications between the Thin Clients and the servers is across a 100MB fiber network.

All during the testing phase of the MMI upgrade things have gone well. Logan Aluminum has worked closely with ACP to get the information that they needed to get all of the software up and running to their satisfaction. ACP provided key contacts at Intellution, and they were a key player in helping Intellution with the development of their TSE product.