Over the years, I have run across a number of system integrators asking question about how to connect various systems. One of the common ones I run across is how to connect Wonderware products to other servers or systems.
The TOP Server InTouch Client driver has been a very effective way to expose InTouch tags to OPC Clients and help with a number of integration challenges. The TOP Server OPC Client Suite has also been helpful with some OPC DA, OPC UA or OPC XML-DA servers connecting to InTouch or Historian using the TOP Server SuiteLink interface for these Wonderware products.
This blog will address what flexible data integration options are available for Wonderware System Platform above and beyond simply device integration servers.
Wonderware System Platform provides a very powerful architecture for integration. There are times, however, that a little help can expand what you thought you could do or make it more cost effective to accomplish. Using the Cogent DataHub’s OPC Alarms and Events (OPC A&E) server ability with System Platform is one example. The DataHub has the ability to read and write to OPC A&E servers and provide that information to System Platform with its OPC DA interface, basically acting as a bridge or “hub” between an OPC A&E Server and OPC DA Clients.
As another example, do you maybe have information on an internal web site you wish you could put expose to System Platform? Using the DataHub’s scripting ability, it can parse out information and provide these data points as OPC DA tags as well. One of our team members did a proof of concept providing energy cost information to a local system using this capability.
Or maybe you need to bring information from a non-windows operating system such as Linux or QNX into your project? The DataHub can help with this as well in many cases using its sister component, the Cascade DataHub.
I have also run across a few cases where someone needed to share data with another company and needed to make sure only that specific data was available to them. The need to pass the information though firewalls and even encrypt it are often part of the requirements for a project like this. Using secure tunneling with SSL certificates is a common use of the DataHub in these situations.
Yet another way to use the DataHub to expand your integration options is to use it to for mundane tasks like aggregating data and bridging information between different systems. This can help minimize the tasks System Platform is executing and increase the overall performance of your project.
There are a number of ways Software Toolbox has helped customers integrate their control systems with Wonderware products over the years. Cogent DataHub, using its ability to act as a hub of information from a wide variety of data sources, provides Wonderware System Platform users yet another feature set to expose the types of actionable data they need to be as productive and profitable as possible.
