That’s interesting. As a European integrator, we have been required to use Siemens from time to time. But we refused most of those projects. Certainly the ones where they also required us to use WinCC.
Some projects we did accept, but with an added cost: as we’re not used to Siemens, and don’t have our usual libraries, we lose time on Siemens development. And Siemens software is slow and bloated anyway, so it always slows you down.
But I thought Siemens must be especially attractive for some clients. Apparently not for you.
As of Ignition 8 the 500 tag limit of Edge was removed, I happily have edge gateways looking at 5,000 tags right now
In regards to Edge device limits, as of somewhere in the 8.0 versions, they changed the maximum number of PLC connections to 2 by default, in order to add more you need to purchase more from Inductive, with it costing around $100 per extra device. This can be worth it for only a few, but compare the cost of edge + extra devices to the cost of the full gateway, eventually it will be cheaper for you to use a stripped down version of a full gateway (Mentioned below).
In regards to the lack of DB support it is true, the edge gateway does not have the ability to talk directly to the database. However you can do some fancy message handling between the edge gateway and your main gateway for any database calls if you NEED it, or take a look at your overall solution and you may be able to architect a system without the need for edge to talk to the database.
If you do have a need to talk to the database, than instead of an edge gateway you could just run a gateway with the Tag historian module, whatever PLC driver you need, and nothing else! Unless you also need visualization, the cost of those modules can be around $2500. This gives you all the advantage of a full gateway, and an edge gateway. That means that you will have all of the gateway scripting, database connections, alarming, and everything that comes by default in Ignition.
People often overlook the fact that you can run a barebones installation with just one or two modules to achieve a specific purpose at the edge node, cutting on cost but not cutting on functionality.
Sounds like such an edge device can as well be used as main gateway + visualization module for a moderate system, reducing cost by an order of magnitude.
Exactly! However to clarify incase someone misreads this, that "Edge device" is TECHNICALLY a full gateway at that point, and no longer Ignition Edge But sometimes that is just what you need, a barebones full gateway at the edge node.
Just remember that this is excluding Vision and Perspective. Adding either UI will spike the cost substantially. A stripped-down "bigger than Edge" license necessarily cannot have a UI.
There are client-count-limited options for Vision and Perspective in a full gateway, just for those just-bigger-than edge cases. Contact your sales agent for details.
