The ArchestrAnaut

System Platform 2012 R2 was released on 11/13.  I haven’t had a chance to download and play with this release but I certainly did spend some time studying the new features.  Below is a direct cut and paste from the Read Me.

ArchestrA System Platform 2012 R2 delivers extensive browsing and data access enhancements from Wonderware Application Server, InTouch HMI logon security, alarm query redundancy, and memory management enhancements, Historian redundancy and performance enhancements, and enhanced operating system and SQL Server support. The following sections describe in greater detail the new features and enhancements delivered with this release.

ArchestrA System Platform 2012 R2 integrates the core products:

Wonderware InTouch HMI 2012 R2 (v10.6)

Wonderware Application Server 2012 R2 (v3.6)

Wonderware Historian Server 2012 R2 (v11.0)

Wonderware Historian Client 2012 R2 (v10.1)

Wonderware Information Server 2012 R2 (v5.0)

New Features – Wonderware InTouch HMI 2012 R2 (v10.6)

Enhanced Support for SQL Server

InTouch HMI 2012 R2 (v10.6) adds support for SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 (32/64-bit), SQL Server Express 2008 R2 with SSME (32-bit), SQL Server 2012 (32/64-bit), and SQL Server Express 2012 (32-bit).

Enhanced Logon Security

The LogonCurrentUser function now supports ArchestrA OS user and ArchestrA OS group security in addition to InTouch security.

Enhanced Memory Management

You can cache into memory the ArchestrA symbols called by the ShowGraphic function or by ShowSymbol animation for improved run-time performance.

Alarm Provider Hot Backup

Alarm Hot Backup Manager can use InTouch, Galaxy, or Galaxy_ as alarm providers when configuring an alarm hot backup pair.

Enhanced Tag Browser access

You can select InTouch tags directly from the Galaxy Browser when working within the animation editor or the script editor.

InTouch Documentation

The InTouch documentation PDF library and online help have been updated with all content accumulated in the InTouch HMI Addendum since InTouch HMI version 10.0.

New Features – Wonderware Application Server 2012 R2 (v3.6)

Communication Across Multiple Galaxies

You can now communicate across multiple galaxies, including browsing a remote galaxy repository (GR) and accessing the run-time data of a remote galaxy, once paired with a local galaxy.

ArchestrA Services Implemented as IDE Extensions

ArchestrA System Platform 2012 R2 introduces the ArchestrA Service Bus (ASB), comprised of individual ArchestrA Services, which enables significantly enhanced levels of information exchange, such as multi-galaxy communication. ArchestrA Services are built upon a service-oriented architecture, which incorporates such general principles as standards-based reusability, discoverability, loose coupling, and modularity.

Enhanced Support for the Historian

Wonderware Application Server 3.6 incorporates enhanced support for the Historian, including:

• Support for partner Historians in a redundant configuration
• Start historizing data without a connection to the Wonderware Historian
• Improved performance when historizing late data
• Support for Historian scalability and data acquisition

Technology Updates

Wonderware Application Server supports 64-bit SQL Server, newer versions of SQL Server, Windows operating systems, .NET Framework, virtualization technologies, and security enhancments.

New Features – Wonderware Historian Server 2012 R2 (v11.0)

High Availability (Redundant Historian)

Support for partner Historians in a redundant (hot backup) configuration.

AppEngines support sending data to either Historian in a pair without requiring separate configurations for each.

Historian Client supports retrieving data from the Historian pairs.

Increased Tier-2 Tag Counts

Supports 500,000 tier-2 tags at a throughput of 125,000 values/second.

New version of the Historian SDK

Support for new historian functionality.

Support for querying summary tags.

Improved Late Data Support

Support sending late data or buffered data to the Historian with the same performance as “real-time” data

Retrieval Based Licensing

The Historian stores tags regardless of the license count.

The Historian prevents data retrieval for more tags than are licensed.

Improved Hierarchical Name Support

Hierarchical namespace support for replicated tagnames.

Application Server Integration Improvements

Support for AppEngine updates to the TrendHi and TrendLo attributes into the Historian Runtime database without requiring a redeploy.

Microsoft Platform Support

Native SQL Server 64-bit support.

New Features – Wonderware Historian Client 2012 R2 (v10.1)

Support for a Partner Historian

If a partner server is configured for a Wonderware Historian, clients will automatically switch servers if the primary server is unavailable.

Technology Updates

The Wonderware Historian Clients support newer versions of operating systems.

New Features – Wonderware Information Server 2012 R2 (v5.0)

New Information Model

The Information Model retrieves and relates data from different sources, such as the Wonderware Historian, the alarm database, and the Wonderware MES database.

New OverView Client

The OverView client is a downloadable application that allows you to navigate data from the Information Model using grids and trends.

Technology Updates

The Wonderware Information Server supports newer versions of SQL Server and operating systems.

Updated Look and Feel

The Wonderware Information Server portal has been updated with new fonts and colors.

So what items in this list excite me?

First I love the constant push to support the later operating systems and SQL Server.  I say later and not latest because they are still lagging about a release behind.  As long as they stay close I think we’ll be ok.

Symbol Cache for items called by ShowGraphic.  We are looking at completely reworking the way we do graphics.  We’ve gone about half way where we develop screens completely in Archestra but deliver them via individual InTouch windows.  Part of the reason for this was related to a concern about long term performance on large systems.  With this improvement we think we’ll be finishing our journey towards a single Window Intouch system.

Cross Galaxy communications!  Wahoo!  We’ve been doing this for a while via OPC Clients and FS Gateway.  However, something more native does sound a lot better.  What I’m hoping is that it works similar to Linked Servers in SQL Server where you can simply define a link to another server then use that as a conduit for data and calls.  What would be really nice is if I can lay down graphical elements from Galaxy A into an InTouch app for Galaxy B.  Hopefully once I get things installed I’ll be able to test this out.

I have no idea what the Archestra Service Bus is but man it looks cool.  Is the the replacement for Mx?  Not sure.  I do plan to do a lot of reading up on this one.  Archestra is easily one of the most open platforms out there and I have a hunch this is going to be an extension of that.

Historian Redundancy!  This is a big big big deal for our customers in qualified environments (i.e. Pharmaceutical customers).  Store and Forward works well the vast majority of the time but you still hold your breath every time you disconnect and reconnect.  There are still a few things that I didn’t see that I need to study more, such as alarm storage redundancy.

All of this is well and good but there is one huge thing still missing.  Alarms and Events are still a second class citizen!  For our customers Alarm and Event storage is just as critical, actually probably more critical than history data.  The only thing I can guess is that there simply aren’t enough other customers out there raising heck about fixing this issue.  To loosely quote a Samsung commercial, maybe we’ll get everything we wanted last year but didn’t get it.

Thoughts, comments, criticisms always welcome!

- Andy

Seeing all the activity at VMWorld via the Twittersphere got me to thinking about some current technologies and how what we do in the “Galaxy” might carry over.

Then it hit me, Archestra is a lot like the famed “Cloud”.  Don’t get me wrong I’m not speaking of the Cloud in a condescending manner.  I think the technologies that make up the collective Cloud are set to transform the way we do work on a scale similar to the integration of the Internet into our daily work flow.  Answer this question honestly… do you feel stranded now when you have to work on your computer without an Internet connection… kinda like leaving the house to drive more than 5 miles away without a cell phone.  Oh the horror.  What will I do if I don’t see that email 1 minute after it’s sent.  I don’t think it’s too far fetched to think that a handful of years in the future we won’t be installing local applications for editing and composition.  Note that I am intentionally leaving out runtime applications as I think that’s a tougher sell to move off site.

Anyway, back to my original thought, how is Archestra like the Cloud and what can we learn from these similarities?

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I think any good App Server engineer needs to learn about checkpointing.  It’s such a critical piece of how App Server does what it does that you can’t simply be ignorant of it.  Fortunately it works so well that most people never have to troubleshoot it… as opposed to troubleshooting why you can’t get communications with a platform to deploy something.

Here’s an article that came out a couple days ago that discusses some instances where the checkpointing system may not act appropriately, or at least how you think it should.

Mash Here

The second article discusses the success of using App Server on the High Speed Chinese Rail project.  I haven’t had  a chance to read it yet but I expect it will be really good.  I think anytime someone tries to tell you App Server can’t scale you can point to this as published evidence of the fact that it can.

Mash Here

We ran into a bootstrap issue on a live system this week.  This customer can’t lose data.  On the plus side, it’s a redundant setup & everything is running fine on one machine.  The problem is that we need to wipe the platform that isn’t running the objects (use Platform Killer).

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Sometime during the middle of last week one of my customers had a network card fail on them.  No big deal.  We’ve got redundancy using teaming on the network cards so we kept humming along without an issue until we got a chance to work on it, which happened to be the same day.

As an aside it happened to be a terminal server, which in this particular environment is a who cares type of thing.  I say this to force you to think about your own environments.  In this particular facility if an operator can’t see something for 10 or 15 minutes it might be an irritation but it’s not cause for a riot.  However, losing process data is a totally different story.  This data is what substantiates the fact that conditions in the facility were and are under control and within limits.  If we don’t have this data we might not be releasing product… and that’s a bad thing for everyone.  I contrast this with a previous stint in a major chemical plant where if the operators lost visibility we went into full blown meltdown mode, not it wasn’t a Nuclear facility but we panicked.  Depending on the plant you could lose everything in a matter of minutes if an abnormal condition came up and you didn’t deal with it in a timely manner.  There was a particular incident where we lost power to the control room (UPS didn’t work either) but the control cabinets stayed up and kept the process running.  After about 5 minutes the decision was made to drop the plant using the big red button on the emergency shutdown system.  It was much safer to bring the plant down using the ESD than allow some condition to run away while we were blind.  All of this just to say there is no one size fits all answer for where you should have your redundancy.  It should be truly driven by your specific requirements in your facility. Read the rest of this entry »

So I hope you enjoyed my previous article on different ways to achieve redundancy in your environments.  However, one really tough lesson hit home with us this pas week.

We purchased a NetGear ReadyNAS PRO network storage array back in 2008.  For the longest time we used it as our primary storage backend for your VMWare ESX environment.  However, sometime last year we installed a newer, bigger, faster array and relegated this guy to just storing a bunch of install media and standalone virtual machines we needed to offload from our laptops.

Anyway, on with the story.  Last Friday we started having problems accessing the data on this unit.  One of our engineers walked into our server room and noticed an X above our #2 disk on the  LCD display.  Well that’s not good.  I get on the horn with CDW and get a new drive in on Monday morning.  We replace the drive but the array won’t start a rebuild.  Well, since we can’t get to the admin console we have to reboot.  In the process of rebooting we lost a second drive.  This was a Raid-5 array across 6 disks.  If you know anything about Raid groups you know that at this point we’re screwed, you can only lose one drive out of a Raid-5.  Long story shorter we lost >3TB worth of virtual machines and install media…and we weren’t backing this unit up… OUCH.  Luckily we are smart enough to store all of our project file in a location that is backed up nightly.

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Depending on your requirements the concept of system redundancy and resiliency might never cross your mind.  For many facilities, however, having a system that minimizes outages and hiccups to an absolute minimum is a must.

When you talk about redundancy you really should look at two different aspects; redundancy and resiliency.  What’s the difference between the two?  For me redundancy is having functions duplicated across multiple components so that if a single component fails the system continues in operation without anyone even noticing.  Resiliency is the ability of a system to easily recover from a failure.

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