The site has 10 different buildings, each with a dedicated PC. Initially, we were told there would be no interconnectivity between buildings. Because of licensing costs, the original thought was to use Ignition Edge Panel for each building. I believe it would only support two connections at once, which I think would be fine, but it would then be limited to 35 days of historical data collection and possibly have some other limitations.
Ideally, if we had full connectivity between the buildings and all the devices in them, I would set up a single Ignition gateway, with all the PCs in each building running only a Perspective View client.
They are now talking about setting up a separate network where only the PCs in each building would be able to communicate with each other. Each PC would have multiple network cards: one to communicate with all the devices in that building and another to communicate with the other PCs.
I'm not sure if that would mean we would need something like Edge IIoT on the PCs in each building to gather I/O from the local devices and then share that data over the dedicated PC network with a single gateway. I'm also not sure whether the network would be set up in a way that would prevent a single gateway from accessing devices in each building that would otherwise be inaccessible.
For redundancy, I was considering installing Ignition Edge Panel on each PC. However, the Perspective screens for each building would need to read their I/O locally while pointing to the central gateway for historical data.
If we were pushing out a single application using EAM to manage it across all the PCs, I'm assuming we could configure the screens in each building to read their data locally, but if an operator navigated to screens for another building, those screens would retrieve their data from the central gateway. I haven't tried doing that before, though.
I've never used Edge Panel with Perspective before. One of the other engineers mentioned just the other day that some graphic objects or features aren't supported in Edge. I thought, or at least hoped, that Edge 8.3 supported everything that a full Ignition gateway does.
For the local PCs in each building, you'd install Ignition Edge Panel (which has all the features of IIoT but with the allowance of 2 clients per system). Edge does not allow connecting to remote tag providers though, so you'd only see the local tags when connected to the local project. You could connect to the central gateway's client to be able to see all systems, but if that network connection fails, then you'd have to launch a separate local client to still have visibility and control from the local PC. If you were using Vision, it has the capability of automatically doing this with a local fallback client that if it loses connectivity to the central gateway that it will connect to the local gateway automatically, but this capability isn't in Perspective.
As for Perspective components, Edge is the same as Perspective except if you're trying to load 3rd party modules. There's some that have been approved/whitelisted by Inductive Automation, but they'd all require you to buy a license for them to use them on Edge. Otherwise the limitations are mainly that you can use database access, you're limited to 2 clients, history is limited to 35 days or 10M tags if I recall, and you can only have a single project and tag provider. There's no limitations for the built-in graphics/symbols, no limitation on scripting (besides things like DB scripting since it's not allowed), and no limitation on tags or devices.
I would use a single redundant pair of Standard edition to cover the whole site. If the client is installing new circuits across the site, suggest the pull extra so you can run rapid spanning tree (or your favorite branded protocol) dual links to all buildings from the central server space. Much better bang for the buck than scattered Edge PCs. And will save you gobs of engineering for fallback projects.
If the separate buildings have their own subnets, just make sure everything is routable to the central gateways. (Or use trunks at your servers and bring every subnet to the gateways as VLANs.)
In the context of core Perspective components, this is true. When Edge is not a consideration, many add (free) 3rd party modules to extend functionality beyond the core components…which is not available (for free) on Edge.
Edit: Sorry, I skipped over @michael.flagler’s message stating the same thing & more.