Offsite OPC Servers: how to Control and Prioritize Bandwidth Consumption?

OPC servers, such as Kepware’s KepServerEx 5.17, facilitate automation and communications between devices and systems, but what happens with geographically distributed systems with bandwidth usage limitations?

The KepServerEx 5.17 update offers new improvements and features. Of all of them, we highlight the new Plug-in Scheduler, specially designed for telecommunications where it is necessary to control bandwidth consumption. It is an addition to KepServerEx that is responsible for accessing data in a controlled manner, facilitating the distribution or use of bandwidth between drivers.

The New Plug-in Scheduler for KepServerEx allows users to manage the mode and frequency with which OPC clients access server data to optimize communications on networks with limited bandwidth. This Plug-in can define polling frequencies or hours for certain tags. It also allows you to define exceptions for certain periods of time in which you do not want to grant access permission.

Ultimately, its main advantage is that we can control and prioritize bandwidth consumption. This is especially useful in geographically distributed environments, since we must use data networks with limited bandwidth. In addition, the cost of using the Network is usually high depending on the volume of data consumed. That is why with this plug-in we can determine when and under what conditions to communicate through these networks. Markets and sectors with geographically distributed systems include: water supply and sanitation, Oil & Gas, and Energy

But the KepServerEX 5.17 update also has other improvements included, such as:

Improvements in the EFM Exporter Plug-in

The EFM Exporter plug-in allows you to collect Oil&Gas consumption information from the specific drivers in this world and generate files that will be imported by a billing software system such as FlowCal. The improvement in this version is that file management is no longer necessary, but a direct connection has been developed between this Plug-in and FlowCal.

Improvements in Local Historian

Local Historian is a low-cost historian that appeared in version 5.16 of KepServerEx and serves the data in OPC-HDA. In this version, the functionality of serving the aggregated data, not only the raw data, has been added. The calculations are done by the Plug-in itself, offloading the processing to the HDA clients and reducing network traffic. The supported aggregate calculations are: Interpolation, Totals, Minimum, Maximum, Statistical Average and Weighted Average.

Allen Bradley Ethernet Driver

The company SoftPLC is a manufacturer of Hardware controllers whose communication mode is very similar to the PLC5 from Allen Bradley. However, SoftPLC controllers have a much larger memory range and now their extended addressing is supported by KepServerEx.

Allen-Bradley Ethernet Driver for Control Logix

Now the most modern ControlLogix are supported with current firmwares (up to v24). In addition, the maximum number of simultaneous channels has been increased from 512 to 1024, which allows a greater number of devices connected in parallel.

Do not hesitate to contact us to provide you with the complete list of improvements or facilitate access to the new version KepServerEx 5.17 and even personally discuss all these developments.