Halfway through a live database migration, Honeywell’s team lost their server connection. With no way to tell whether the scripts were running or failing, all they could do was wait. In this episode of Stay Sharp with Razorleaf, hosts Juliann Grant and Jonathan Scott sit down with Ryan Sims (Senior IT Engineer at Honeywell) and Brian Neff (MES Technical Team Lead at Razorleaf) to discuss how Honeywell Aerospace successfully upgraded its Solumina MES with zero shop floor disruptions.
Key takeaways from the episode:
- The Drivers Behind Upgrading: How addressing deferred maintenance prevents today's stable systems from becoming tomorrow's technical debt.
- Parallel Infrastructure Strategy: Standing up new Kubernetes application clusters in advance while leaving active production running for a seamless cutover.
- The Power Outage Test: How a sudden network connection drop during database migration proved the value of an immediate, executable rollback plan.
- Testing Beyond Release Notes: Why unit, integration, and user acceptance testing (UAT) must focus on end-to-end business processes, database triggers, and hidden code dependencies.
- Post-Go-Live Risk Mitigation: Preserving a legacy QA environment post-launch as an insurance policy to isolate new bugs versus pre-existing system issues.
Main Episode Points
Why Modernize MES Infrastructure? Honeywell originally implemented Solumina to replace two legacy, high-tech-debt MES solutions. To keep Solumina from becoming tech debt itself, Honeywell needed to move off aging Red Hat 7 operating systems to Red Hat 8, transition to version i110.2, and simplify its underlying landscape by dropping MongoDB dependencies.
Architecting a Zero-Disruption Strategy To protect shop floor productivity, the team provisioned new application servers for the new Kubernetes cluster well before launch day. By maintaining existing ActiveMQ and Apache reverse proxy servers, they eliminated the need for IP or DNS changes across plant users and key integrations like SAP and Teamcenter. Cutting over—or rolling back—was as fast as switching a URL rewrite rule and restarting Apache.
Managing Unexpected Hurdles During the migration weekend, a power outage in a neighboring building disrupted the database connection. Because SQL logs filled up during the blind run, the team relied on a pre-planned full database backup to restore and re-run upgrade scripts without delaying operations. Later, when a minor SAP bill of materials (BOM) integration issue arose during post-launch smoke testing, the technical team authored a pre-processing fix within hours.
Best Practices for Enterprise System Upgrades
- Leverage Non-Production Environments: Work through dev, test, and sandbox stages to refine custom IT security scripts before touching production.
- Set Go/No-Go Checkpoints: Establish strict time thresholds for rollback decisions using real-world data timing tests.
- Keep Old Environments Alive Temporarily: Maintain the previous version in a non-production QA state to verify whether post-launch issues are new or legacy.
- Audit Scheduled Tasks: Ensure legacy background tasks and cron jobs are disabled so old system nodes do not auto-start after server reboots.
Guest Information
- Ryan Sims - Senior IT Engineer at Honeywell in Muncie, Indiana. Ryan supports the Solumina environment for Honeywell Aerospace in Clearwater, Florida, having managed seven non-production and production instances.
- Brian Neff - MES Technical Team Lead at Razorleaf. Brian brings over 20 years of experience across software development, database architecture, and Agile technical leadership.
Resources Mentioned
● Razorleaf Corporation
● iBase-t Solumina MES
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