I was wondering if anyone can answer a few questions our team has about ignition. We would be setting up a brand new platform from scratch. While I see that the information says unlimited tags has anyone found a point at which the system is overloaded. We have just under 25K tags in our system and we would like some feedback from anyone that is using close to our number. This system will be deployed to a windows server 2017 and we would also set up redundancy.
We also currently have a system that we would like to keep the tag history. We use historian for Wonderware and didn't know if there was a way to keep that information and how we needed to go about it.
Also, we use a kepware server and I believe we would like to move away from that as well since it seems that ignition can handle everything we need it to. Is there a way to convert our kepware file to the OPC UA that ignition uses?
So technically Ignition doesn't have a tag limit. However, practically you will reach a limit where your hardware, ie CPU, doesn't keep up, and memory is exhausted.
When architecting the system, where you can make sure that the SQL database is hosted on a separate Server/PC/VM Instance than Ignition. Especially if you are using MSSQL. We typically deploy systems with Ignition and MySQL on the same box and don't have any noticeable issues. Our tag counts run around where yours are. However, your application may be completely different with lost of scripting and processing running on the Gateway. Our typical application is status screens and popups with not much else going on in the background except for historizing.
Where our customers can, we typically push to put the Gateways and SQL Servers onto server-class machines. Not all of our customers can afford that though.
Thanks for the info. We would be loading inductive into enterprise grade data centers off site so I am sure we would separate the system out for best quality. We currently use 4 vm servers now to handle our Wonderware system so we would have them available. We are mainly looking for a system that would be a little more cost effective on an annual basis and it seems that ignition would work in the initial research we have done so far.
Like everyone I am sure, we are very concerned with security and making sure we can set up different users with different privileges is our main concern when it comes to switching over to a new system. It appears that you can achieve this in Ignition. Along with that we would like to have some sort of external access like a website that we could log into with MFA. Is this possible? And would we have to do two seperate developments for phones, tablets and then for our main application?
Honestly... the best person you can talk to about architecture-specific questions is your sales rep. Have them set up a meeting with a sales engineer and talk through this stuff.
Yeah, I completely understand what you're saying. Just hoping to some real-world application from others using the products vs. the sales engineer. We are planning a meeting with one of them just wanted to go into it with some knowledge of what can be done and knowing what questions we really need to drill down on to make sure the product works for us. Thanks.
Off site is wonderful for many purposes, but is a complete disaster for the performance of legacy PLC protocols. They are all very sensitive to latency, as they generally only permit one request (or just a handful) to be on the wire at a time. Use OPC/UA servers or MQTT publishers or Ignition's GAN or similar report-by-exception modern protocols to deliver machine information to your data centers.
Thanks for the input. We will bring that up in our meeting. We currently have the system working just fine with our current offsite servers and legacy protocols, however maybe ignition would have an issue with this were as Wonderware does not. We are mainly looking at a new more cost-effective SCADA system.