In response to customer demand for an enterprise-grade product, real-time performance management software vendor OSIsoft this week released a new version of its PI System, which is said to provide secure delivery and display of real-time data in mission-critical environments.
The new release, called the High Availability (HA) PI System, includes native support for fail-over and redundancy, which in the event of unplanned (or planned) downtime maintains access to data, the company said.
Through 2005, OSIsoft offered its base historian with associated modules and supporting gear -- including thin client terminals -- under a loose umbrella known as the RtPM (Real-Time Performance Management) Platform. The company began a rebranding campaign in 2006 when customers called for a unified platform built with native interoperability, Maureen Coveney, vice president of marketing for OSIsoft, told Managing Automation in an interview. The platform is now referred to collectively as the PI System.
Most of OSIsoft's customers are in the power transmission or utility industries as well as process-audited industries like pharmaceuticals that require near 100% system availability. Traditional industrial companies are also beginning to take notice of OSIsoft's offerings, Coveney said, pointing to a large petrochemical company that is using OSIsoft's performance management software.
The current iteration of HA PI eliminates the need for writing custom code on the customer side, with 80% to 90% of current users' configurations supported, said Greg LeBlanc, OSIsoft's director of technical strategy. Ongoing upgrades are planned that would eventually negate any custom code and include features such as load balancing, whereby processing is moved from overtaxed to underutilized servers to accommodate increases in user demand.
OSIsoft officials said the software's high availability is enabled via:
- PI Server replication: Redundant PI Servers including a primary and one or more secondary servers, together referred to as a "collective." The PI server configuration tables are replicated across the collective.
- Interfaces: All application interfaces write time-series data directly to members of the collective, buffering data temporarily for those unable to receive it for a period of time and assuring that time-series data stored in each archive is an exact duplicate of the others.
- Fail-over: Changes to the PI interface design include the ability to have a pair of PI interface nodes connected to a PI Server or to the collective. If the primary interface node fails to deliver data to the PI Servers, it will fail-over to the secondary PI interface to run in "hot" standby mode. PI interfaces can now be started without a connection to the PI server.
OSIsoft
recently inked a development partnership with Rockwell Automation, which extends OSIsoft's reach beyond process applications into discrete manufacturing industries, LeBlanc said.
The company also recently announced a
major contract win with the State Grid Corp. of China to deploy OSIsoft's platform at 5,000 power plants to avoid outages and ensure grid stability. According to LeBlanc, State Grid Corp. is bringing online an average of one power plant per week (each representing 1000 mW of power) which the OSIsoft system so far has been able to handle without incident.
The scale of the Chinese project has been one of the motivations for HA PI, LeBlanc said. The project eventually will incorporate HA PI for faster implementation due to its off-the-shelf capabilities.
The key to OSIsoft's success has been the ability of its products to install quickly and to accommodate existing operational data, regardless of how it is specified, according to LeBlanc. Coveney said the company's product architecture has evolved to support its core mission of connecting the plant to the business by archiving, calculating, and distributing information to users throughout the enterprise.
But it's up to users to decide how to use the data, LeBlanc said. "Our job is to keep the data flowing, archived, and ready for use," he concluded.