The ArchestrAnaut

Jay David and I have been exchanging private emails over the past couple weeks after he commented on my China Rail entry.  I had lamented the fact that there are some really great stories out there with System Platform as the foundation for some really complex and really large systems.  Jay took that inspiration and started a new blog at

www.automationsuccess.com

The first set of articles he has posted focuses on the China Rail success story.  It looks like he’s going to cool off on that in the immediate future and try to highlight other success stories.  Here’s hoping he brings us more good ones.  As a system integrator I get to see and work with a decent variety of projects, customers, and industries.  However, with Jay’s position within Invensys he probably gets exposure to more projects than any of us.

Jay has also pointed me to a much larger site that until now was unaware of.  It has a lot more success stories.

http://iom.invensys.com/EN/Pages/SuccessStoriesAll.aspx

Thanks Jay and keep up the great work.

- Andy

We had a great lunch and learn with the Invensys team to review the new Wonderware PAC.  Most of my colleagues came away with a similar opinion as my own.  It looks like a good product and the price point, especially for redundant controllers, is definitely a big selling point.  Our issue, however, is going to be convincing our existing customers who love their Allen Bradley or other PLC’s to start using a product they’ve never seen before, no matter the history overseas.  This isn’t really a secret and our partners at Invensys certainly appreciate this.  I think ultimately it’s going to be a combination of a customer who is open minded and a System Platform environment to take advantage of the integration.  While it doesn’t appear they are quite there with traditional DCS level integration, you can definitely see the roadmap.

As many of you may have known, there was an issue with the alarm logger running as a service under any of the Windows Vista style OS’s.  You can reference Tech Note 725 for the details.

I exchanged a few emails with John Krajewski, the Product Manager for HMI/SCADA, and he has informed me that a fix for this issue will be released with the next patch, due out some time this Spring.  He also indicated that they are working on a longer term fix for the issue of having to run a separate component to log alarms.  In my discussions with him I told him I wanted a configuration in IAS like we have for the Historian.  We check a couple check boxes and go about our merry way.  I know underneath it might be some separate sub process but in terms of management and interface it’s simplified drastically.  No timeline on this one but I for one will be really excited to see it.

Unbeknownst to me a member of the press happened to find my presentation on challenges in a greenfield parenteral filling facility interesting enough to write up.

http://www.automationworld.com/feature-7744

Ok, the picture isn’t great but if you can get past that it gives a nice summary of the talk.

- Andy

It was quite the first real day at Ops Manage.  As always it started off with a large group session talking about big issues and bigger ideas.

A few of the more notable items from the talk

Everyone’s talking about the cloud and Invensys is no different.  There was a very interesting proof of concept showing something they are calling "Archestra Global Storage".  The big idea is that you have a centralized, cloud-based, repository for all of your standards.  Then, using right clicks in the IDE you can move items to and from a local library and then manage those templates between your local library and the library hosted on Archestra Global storage.  While I’m not exactly clear why you would require a private could platform to host this, as opposed to a web service or app inside your business firewall, it was still quite interesting.

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Drove down to Orlando yesterday. We didn’t hit any 1 hour construction or wreck delays on I-95, which I’ve found to be typical during my years of traveling the corridor.

The accommodations at the Peabody are outstanding, well done on the venue selection Invensys.

This afternoon we had a dry run for the presentations in the Life Sciences Industry session.  Overall I think it went well, we’ll see how things go in the real world tomorrow.

Throughout the course of the conference I’ll be posting thoughts and reviews if you will based on what I’m seeing and hearing.