Electron, a Dutch Corporation, was founded in 1988. Today, as a member of the Glaesum Group, it maintains a large manufacturing facility and corporate offices in Nijkerk, The Netherlands.

Electron is a major player and technology leader, with more than 25 years’ experience in providing turnkey heat treatment and diffusion coating solutions. Meeting its customers’ needs – from product design to manufacturing, and from follow-up service to maintenance – is what sets Electron apart from other furnace system manufacturers. 

Electron is dedicated specifically to the thermal processing industry. Their key personnel have been individually selected for their knowledge and skill in the thermal processing industry.

Superior design features, quality aftermarket service, and a growing list of satisfied customers makes Electron the best qualified company to supply furnace equipment to thermal processing needs.

In the past we made the Kelvin TTX custom-made and smart! Please refer to the Kelvin TTX case study. Having used a number of these machines several optimization possibilities have been recognized and listed as challenges below.

Network connectivity

A majority of Kelvin TTX machines are placed behind Network Address Translation and, as a result, are not directly accessible from the Internet for management purposes. Asking local IT to set up IP port forwarding is not an option.

Operational Cost

It is an operational burden to maintain the internal hardware of Kelvin TTX. Maintenance requires physical site visits where engineers need to perform hardware firmware upgrades and software updates.

Standardization

Kelvin TTX is a complex machine which has multiple hardware devices to be managed, these devices are connected to a small local network in order to communicate internally. Due to the standard assembly process, each device has exactly the same set of settings (including internal network IP range) that is why having a network of all directly and constantly connected Kelvin TTX machines via secure tunnel simply is  not possible.

AWS had all necessary building blocks for this project, Synadia only had to utilize them, the need to search for an alternative in another place was simply out of the question.

The AWS cloud was ideal for this challenge since it has offered nearly out of the box an easy way to securely register and remotely manage,  organize, monitor and troubleshoot and query the state of any Kelvin TTX machine.

Additionally,  inexpensive compute and storage, ability to back up resources easily, native support for infrastructure as Code confirmed once again that AWS has everything that is needed for almost any challenge.

Using Amazon Web Services (AWS) allowed Synadia to build the solution with the increased speed, reliability and better performance and at the same time with very low costs in comparison to other remote management services currently available on the market.

Synadia made it possible to connect on-demand to specific remote kelvin machine for management purposes. The main trick here was to remotely ask Kelvin TTX to establish a secure channel with the cloud, configure certain components of Kelvin TTX to act as a network gateway and enable TCP communication between managing station or a laptop of a maintenance engineer and all other hardware components of Kelvin TTX that had to be managed. Below you will find a description of how this was achieved: