Hello,
We are scaling out a project with a central Ingiton gateway and Ignition Edge IOT devices. All edge IOT projects has the same tag structure, so they appear identically in the central gateway, but under different remote tag provider (named after the edge gateway name). This way we can utilize templates, queries and scripts by only passing the tag provider name as a parameter. Each edge device has its own remote history provider in the central server and uses its own database.
Currently we need to add 4 edge devices, but it happened that although they are different logical units, they will be located in one cabinet. We want to keep central server project structure which distinguish all edge device by their tag provider name. The obvious solutions is to add 4 PCs with Ignition Edge IOT, but I was thinking of adding 1 PC with full featured Ignition instead. This way we could make 4 unique tag providers, so the central server will never know that they live on the same gateway.
What do you think - Is this going to work?
Can I replace the 4 Edge IOT licenses with 1 Ignition Core module + Cirrus Link MQTT Transmission Module (MQTT is used to send data to 3'd party systems)?
Thanks!
When you say edge and central Ignition, are they in the same physical location or separate physical locations? If at the same physical location you could skip the new licenses completely and add them directly to the central system. If remote and you need local control, doing them split or combined would work either way. One thing to consider though is if the units are locally controlled, is any redundancy needed where if one unit/PC is down, you still want to run the others? If so, you may consider keeping it split up.
Thanks for the fast reply Michael! The central gateway and edge devices are placed in different locations. Each edge device controls a solar plant. The central gateway is in the head office. It is used for remote control, monitoring and archiving of the plants. Normally, one solar plant should have 1 edge device. But in the current case we have one big solar split in four parts (for some legal reasons). Each part has independent scheduling, control and power meters, so we treat them as 4 different solar plants. I think that putting all 4 projects into one gateway is better than running four Edge IOT on four machines. Do you know if the 35 day temporary storage provided in Edge IOT is also available in Ignition. If yes - do I need a historian license or it is provided by the remote historian provider?
Either you use the historian module, or SQL Bridge module (transaction groups), or for no cost you can write a script to insert the data to a DB.
Also it's only 35 days on Edge. On full it's as much as your DB can hold.
On the central Ignition server, you do need the historian module to push from Edge to long-term history via the GAN.
I have historian on the central gateway and it collects the history from all edge devices. The question is : do I need historian on the remote ignition gateway (the one at the solar plant). In case of connection failure, Ignition Edge IOT keeps the history until the connection restores but I'm not sure if this works the same way in the full Ignition version without historian module.
It doesn't work the same way. The remote standard Ignition would use a remote history provider, I think. (Yes, you need the historian module there.)
Just make sure that if that plant PC goes down for any reason that you're OK losing all 4 "plants" at the same time. If you split it up between 4 edge devices/systems, then one of those going down won't affect the others unless it's an internet/power outage and even then there's way's to try to prevent those common outage problems.
One redundant pair of gateways is far superior to non-redundant and four edge. Full stop.
If you are deploying Edge in the same physical facility as a Standard Ignition install, you are screwing up. IMNSHO.
Well, we have use cases where I could see standalone Edge in the same plant as an Ignition system. In Oil and Gas they have some standalone systems that can be operated independent of the main plant and are designed and built by 3rd parties. While I'd like to see them go to Ignition, they're all still PanelViews, but replacing those with Edge Panel would be nice. Then we could pull in their tags/screens to the main Ignition system and few them all natively rather than over VNC.
Just make your main facility Ignition talk directly to the PLCs. Ignore the PanelViews. Leave them for the local control the vendor supports. Make your vendors use standardized data structures. 
Concur.
I have full Ignition in a dairy. I installed a robot (cobot) cell in the dairy and a Honeywell IP67 tablet. There's an OnLogic driving a Hope Industrial which moves between stations as the cobot does different tasks on different days. It was more economical to install 1 x Edge Panel, using Perspective, to complement for diagnostics around the cobot cell than to add 1 Perspective seat to the full license (everything else is Vision).