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Enterprise storage management software provider OSIsoft is updating its PI System, the companys flagship real-time data historian platform.
The enhanced platform, called High Availability PI System and announced Jan. 2, provides improved data protection through fault-tolerant software that delivers interface failover, buffering, server replication and software development services, according to an OSIsoft spokesperson in San Leandro, Calif.
Primary technical advances in the new release include server replication, improved interfaces and failover changes to the PI interface. Redundant PI Servers include a primary server and one or more secondary servers, together referred to as a “collective,” the spokesperson said.
All 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 ensuring that time-series data stored in each archive is an exact duplicate of the others, the spokesperson said.
Failover changes to the PI interface designed to accommodate high availability, or HA, 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.
In addition, PI interfaces can now be started without a connection to the PI Server, the spokesperson said.
“Its no coincidence that data historians have re-emerged as a critical foundational element of emerging manufacturing SOAs [service-oriented architectures],” analyst Colin Masson wrote in an October 2006 AMR Research article titled “SOA on Steroids: The Reality of Manufacturing Composite Applications.”
“This new generation of data historians do much more than aggregate, compress, archive and trend real-time data,” Masson wrote. “Today they are huge (and sometimes distributed) state detection machines, designed for complex definition and real-time evaluation of complex events.”
OSIsoft users can upgrade from PI System to High Availability PI System with point-and-click tools that use existing system components and infrastructure.