Hydra is developing an innovative disaster recovery platform to ensure rapid restoration of electricity distribution control systems following cyberattacks, system failures, or infrastructure loss. As we transition to Net Zero, the network will become more complex and digitally controlled to accommodate increasing volumes of low carbon technologies and flexible demand. Maintaining reliable system oversight and response capabilities becomes ever more critical.
By maintaining a live, air-gapped, view-only replica of the Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS), Hydra enables near-instant failover and recovery. Unlike existing backup and recovery systems that have redundant nodes, its architectural innovation, combining real-time data streaming, automated server builds, and transaction roll-forward capabilities, sets a new industry benchmark for operational resilience that is currently not in use by the electricity distribution sector today.
Objectives
The core objectives of the project are:
- To prove that a real-time, securely isolated hot standby disaster recovery solutions can scale effectively to replicate high availability (HA) clusters at production levels of transactions
- To develop a control system which is objectively less vulnerable to cyber threats and technical issues
- To deliver a platform evidencing that it can be recovered more quickly than is currently possible using standard DNO practices by deploying automation
- To create and demonstrate the capability to quickly restore the system state to a known-good point in time
- To create and demonstrate the capacity to roll-forward and restore transactions to a time as close as possible to the time of failure
- To prove that the supporting business processes defined by the project are effective
