We’ve been using Ignition since 2010. We installed it for testing then almost immediately adopted and licensed it. We’ve been steadily expanding and increasingly relying on it ever since. The problem is, when we started we had no idea where Ignition would go or exactly what we needed so we setup a basic installation. Today, it seems an appropriate time to step back, look at where we’re headed and reconfigure the installation to better suit our needs. There are items we’d like to address.
Right now we have three physical sites linked by broadband and VPN to a single Ignition instance (running on our vSphere infrastructure). That works great until we get a weather event and lose FiOS and/or Comcast. We’re trying to avoid historian data loss so I suspect what we need is additional instances configured for store and forward at two of the sites so we can better tolerate connectivity outages. Our use of Ignition is for building management, not process management so store and forward seems to make more sense than setting up redundant gateways.
Second, we originally installed Ignition under Windows Server anticipating the need for it to integrate protocols such as BACnet and Johnson N2. To date, that hasn’t come up in a way we couldn’t handle reasonably efficiently in some other manner so moving forward we’d prefer to migrate and standardize on somthing like Ubuntu Server x64 for stability, performance and licensing reasons.
Any guidance, experience, best practice or dirty jokes that anyone can share to help us accomplish these two goals would be greatly appreciated.