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Q & A
What is the Wonderware Historian?
The Wonderware Historian is a high performance, high availability plant data historian that enhances any Wonderware installation by providing the means to cost effectively collect, store and retrieve large amounts of valuable plant data. This data can then be analyzed by a complete range of data clients to provide manufacturers the real-time plant intelligence they need to continuously improve plant performance.
Aren't there problems using a relational database as the historian in large applications?
The Wonderware Historian does not store time-series plant data into relational tables. The Wonderware Historian builds on Microsoft's foundation, adding specialized files that efficiently store time-series data in approximately 2% of the space required by standard SQL Server tables. Further, the Wonderware Historian extends Microsoft's Transact-SQL, making it easier to retrieve time-series data using a SQL statement. There are also wizards available that will automatically build a query for users who are not familiar with SQL. These, and other extensions to SQL Server, address the traditional limitations of using relational databases as an historian.
What is IDAS?
The Industrial Data Acquisition Service or IDAS is a Windows service that can be installed anywhere on a plant network and automatically acquires plant data from I/O Servers and forwards the data for storage within the Wonderware Historian. The capability to implement one or more IDAS's on remote nodes allows the Wonderware Historian to be particularly flexible and robust. The Wonderware Industrial Application Server already has the IDAS capability built into it and can send data directly to the Wonderware Historian.
IDAS can be configured for Failover or Store & Forward. IDAS Failover protects the Wonderware Historian from data loss by automatically failing over to a secondary IDAS node if the primary is lost. In Store & Forward mode, the Wonderware Historian is also protected from data loss if the Historian node itself is lost. Remote IDAS nodes store data until the Historian node is restored and stored data is forwarded to the Historian node to ensure a complete data record. Configuration of either high availability feature involves just a few mouse clicks with the Wonderware Historian. Customers interested in both Failover and Store & Forward should consider using a redundant Industrial Application Server configuration with the Wonderware Historian.
What markets are a good fit for the Wonderware Historian?
The Wonderware Historian can be applied to any industry where acquiring, storing and retrieving plant or operations data to facilitate continuous improvement is needed. Wonderware is the world leader in cost effective plant data historians with over 14,000 licenses sold world-wide since its introduction in 1997. The Wonderware Historian has been particularly successful within; Food & Beverage, Distributed SCADA, Chemicals, Medical & Pharmaceuticals, Metals & Mining, Oil & Gas, Semiconductors and Water & Waste Water.
The Wonderware Historian differentiates itself by its value and its tight integration with other Wonderware products like InTouch and Industrial Application Server. Unlike costly proprietary plant historians, the Wonderware Historian is built on Microsoft's SQL Server, making it an open, highly scalable and cost effective historian solution. Users appreciate the connectivity to a very wide variety of plant data sources and the ease of accessing data stored within the Wonderware Historian using standardized data access tools. They also appreciate the high availability functionality built into the system giving customers the peace of mind that their valuable data will be available when they need it. And, the Wonderware Historian is a complete Plant Intelligence solution providing a collection of data client applications that cover a broad range of capabilities from trend analysis and reporting to downtime tracking to SPC charting to web delivery of plant intelligence information.
How is the Wonderware Historian licensed?
The Wonderware Historian is licensed by tag count and by Edition. Tag counts of 100, 500, 5K, 25K, 70K, 100K and 150K are available. The Wonderware Historian is available in a Personal, Standard and Enterprise Edition. The Standard and Enterprise Edition license includes the Wonderware Information Server and a single Client Access License (CAL) for web-based reporting and analysis. Additional Wonderware Information Server CALs can also be purchased. Also, the Wonderware ActiveFactory Client software can be purchased for integration with Microsoft Office Tools for Analysis and Reporting.
What is the Wonderware Historian Enterprise Edition running in a cluster environment?
How it works:
The Wonderware Historian Enterprise for a Cluster is designed as an Active-Passive implementation. With a cluster you have two computers that share a common storage array. Typically this is a SAN (Storage Area Network) or similar multi-ported storage array. The two computers share a virtual IP address and node name between them so that clients do not connect to a specific server. There is a dedicated NIC between the two. The Wonderware Historian services are installed on both servers. They are running on the Active server and stopped on the Passive server. When the Active server is no longer available, the services on the Passive server are started up. This behaves just like a normal start of the Wonderware Historian and takes just as long as if starting on a non clustered server. After the Passive starts up all the services then it takes over the virtual IP address and node name and accepts the connection requests from all the clients. Once the Services start up they have access to the same history blocks as the original Active server had on the shared storage array. During this failover time your IAS engines and remote IDASs will enter a store forward mode, if configured to do so, to buffer history collection and then restore missing data to the Wonderware Historian database.
What are the benefits?
The main benefit here is nearly continuous availability of the historical data for Trending and Reporting. An organization will have to evaluate what this means to them. In a plant environment with a robust LAN this could be advantageous. For implementation questions, all the hardware manufactures have good documents on their web sites as well as Microsoft. The Wonderware Historian Enterprise is not any different from any other cluster aware application. It is actually a very simple concept. Clustering allows a service to run on two computers, one at a time, which share a common data storage device and are accessed via a common IP or node name.
What customer training is available for the Wonderware Historian?
Wonderware's Training group regularly offers the Wonderware Historian training course in Lake Forest, California. Wonderware Distributors also offer local classes. See the training schedule at www.wonderware.com/Training/ for more information.