Opc ua server in ignition

General Discussion
1

Hi there. I’m just new to ignition - we are just evaluating at this point. I’ve been reading about the OPC UA capabilities of the product in the user guide, but it’s not clear to me whether ignition provides its own opc server, or if you have to purchase a third party one, like let’s say,
Here’s the paragraph I’m reading in their user guide:

The OPC-UA architecture is very similar to the Standard architecture, but with only the Ignition OPC-UA
module installed on the server. In this configuration, the Ignition gateway acts as a dedicated OPC-UA
server. Any remote OPC-UA client, including other Ignition gateways, with network access can connect
to the server and read and write data.

My questions are as follows:

  1. Does Ignition come with it’s own OPC UA server and all the drivers to connect to different PLCS from different vendors?
  2. If it’s dependant on 3rd party OPC Servers, do you still need to purhcase the OPC UA module?
  3. It sounds like I would need to set up multiple gateways… at least 2 if I wanted to use Ignition for monitoring real time data on PLCs (OPC portion) and let’s say, using Ignition for other features like alarm paging etc. is this correct?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

2

We have our own OPC-UA server with drivers for ControlLogix, CompactLogix, MicroLogix, SLC5, PLC5, Modbus, and Siemens S7.

We can also connect to 3rd party OPC-DA and OPC-UA servers.

Edit: Forgot to answer all of your question.

  1. You need the OPC-UA module to make UA connections and the OPC-COM module to make DCOM/DA connections.

  2. You only need one gateway, unless you need to get to PLCs in different physical locations and don’t have remote network access or something.