10 Differentiating Values to get Even more from your SCADA with a Historian

You probably already know that InTouch is the number one HMI interface in the world. It is used daily in more than a third of the world’s industrial facilities. This is not by chance, but because InTouch HMI offers legendary ease of use, brilliant graphics, and great engineering efficiency. InTouch can also help shorten project times, reduce risk, and significantly reduce the total cost of ownership.

InTouch HMI, by itself, is already very powerful. However, adding Wonderware Historian to the software suite leads to expanding the capabilities of data collection, advanced analysis, expanding reports, increasing productivity, and improving data security. And not only to Intouch HMI, but to any plant SCADA. Historian is the key to unifying plant data in a scalable and secure way!

What is Wonderware Historian?

Historian is a high-performance real-time database that offers high scalability up to 2,000,000 tags and provides significant performance improvements in data storage and compression compared to relational database engines. Just a few numbers:

• > 2 million tags.
• 2% of storage space required compared to similar data in a relational database.
• 150,000 tags/second sustained indefinitely on a single server using conventional hardware.
• Compression of up to 40 times the alarms and events, acquired up to 1000 messages/second.

Adding Historian to your InTouch HMI will surely help you expand productivity and improve your bottom line while continuing to capitalize on your existing software investment. It’s about turning a solid HMI investment into a superior strategic solution.

In the following points, we tell you 10 differentiating values that you will achieve by adding Wonderware Historian to your set of SCADA systems:

1. Centralize and aggregate data

Historian allows you to collect and aggregate data from the distributed nodes of InTouch HMI (all historical data is available for each InTouch HMI node in the architecture) and not only from Intouch nodes, but from the multiple and diverse data sources you have in the plant (not only Wonderware). Historian offers a single resource for data across the system. In addition, data can be aggregated (summarized) using advanced statistical calculations to give a deeper understanding of operations data.

2. Simple and flexible reports

Historian’s client tools provide incredibly simple access to operational data, trending tools, and multiple reporting tools including web dashboards, queries, Microsoft SQL Reporting Services, and Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word add-ins. This greatly expands the flexibility to create different reports for different needs.

3. Better root cause analysis: In-depth data analysis

Historian combined with Historian Client provides powerful reporting and analysis functions and an integrated view of the process, alarms and production history, trends, overlays and drill-down. These features allow you to easily navigate through data and break down problems into their components.

4. Aggregate data: Multi-level Historian

Historian can be configured with a cascading (or tiered) architecture so that data from smaller Historians can be aggregated into higher-level Historians. Data in remote locations can be easily aggregated into a central Historian and Unified Operations Center (UOC).

5. Isolate data and easier sharing

Historian is the perfect solution for sharing operational data with users in other layers of the business without compromising the security or performance of the control network. It is very simple to implement two Historian servers in cascade, one to serve the needs of the control networks, which forwards its data to a second server that serves the needs of the users of the business network.

6. Save money and space: Greater data compression for storage

Historian compresses data up to forty times more than conventional relational database systems to reduce costs for storage and management requirements. In addition, smaller data storage requirements can translate into faster data retrieval.

7. Greater data security in an insecure environment

Historian compresses and encrypts data into historical blocks that can be accessed from SQL. Historian’s data collection and tiering can be encrypted for secure data transfer across networks.

8. Low cost and highly effective: Historian “local”

Historian offers a limited license type to provide a very cost-effective historian for local or remote locations that may experience intermittent connectivity to the main site. Historian local provides up to 7 days of local data recovery and reporting. It is ideal for stand-alone InTouch HMI nodes or for multiple InTouch HMI nodes in which data from multiple local historians are aggregated to a centralized tier 2 historian.

9. Continue evolving towards the future: consolidate your data in the cloud

Historian is the future of data acquisition and storage, and continues to provide access to cloud technologies such as Wonderware Insight. Historian makes it very easy to replicate local data to Wonderware’s cloud solution.

10. Let’s finish with something more technical: the technical functionalities provided are very differentiating

Historian allows you to store data at the resolution of the process and retrieve data at the resolution of the problem you are trying to solve. In addition, it includes the Swingig Door algorithm, which only stores rate of change information.

One of Historian’s greatest assets are the Transact-SQL extensions that are used with Microsoft SQL. These extensions are exposed in the WHERE clause to control how data is retrieved from history blocks. This gives us control over the resolution of the data that is retrieved with various options such as Cyclic, Delta, Full and Best Fit. In addition, there are query options for recovery and transformations of analog variables such as time-weighted average, maximum value and time (same for minimum), standard deviation, integral (perfect for flow rates) and the “To Discrete” which allows transforming an analog value into a digital one. Then also other extensions for discrete transformations such as “Total Time in State” which allows us to know in a single query how long a digital variable has been in true and how long it has been in false.

These functions and extensions are very powerful, and allow you to extract not only data from Historian, but information, which can be used to make better decisions in less time.