Hi all,
We just added a bunch of new drivers to our offering:
New are the:
Bosch Rexroth CtrlX, Schneider Electric UMAS and Siemens S7-WebAPI. I guess there's already an existing S7/S7+ driver, but people had been asking me to publish it, as they were not really happy with the existing one.
They are still very fresh modules ... so I'm planning on bundling the first year of support for the next few months (Which usually defaults to 20% of the purchase cost).
Chris
IA is not backporting S7+ to Ignition v8.1, and I suspect many users will drag out their upgrades to the end of 8.1 LTS.
(I will continue publishing my modules for v8.1 through that timeframe, too.)
I would love to bench test the two S7+ drivers against each other one of these days.
I hand't even thought about the 8.1 users and that there is no s7+ there ... disadvantage is that due to the UI limitations of 8.1 that module doesn't have auto-discovery as the 8.3 does. But good point about that 
And David ... just apply for a trial and you can bench them as much as you want (I'd be interested in that too) ... also this latest benchmark might be interesting too: Five Doors Into One Siemens Controller: What Each One Costs You — ToddySoft However that's benching S7Comm against S7CommPlus against Modbus against OPC-UA and S7-WebAPI (All are my own drivers however)
Your article comparing the protocols available in Siemens systems is very interesting. 
A further step would be to compare the options for managing CPU redundancy in S7, S7+, and OPC UA. It's a complex area...
Oh ... there's so much you can measure here My server is literally running benchmark scenario over benchmark scenario 24 hours a day for the last 5 days. Hopefully I'll have the numbers for Beckhoff, Schneider Electric, Rockwell soon so I can write the benchmark articles on them and finally go back to coding
Having a computer and literally not being able to do much with it because it's running benchmarks is nerve wrecking.