Software Toolbox Technical Blog

For OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), delivering high-performance machinery is an absolute requirement. However, their true measurement of success lies with ensuring long-term reliability and maximizing uptime for their customers. Downtime isn’t just an inconvenience – it can result in substantial financial losses, impacting both productivity and profitability. By prioritizing dependability in their chosen solutions, OEMs can strengthen customer trust, enhance operational efficiency, and differentiate themselves in a competitive market.

Although Cogent DataHub is best known for its wide range of connectivity interfaces, its intuitive design for configuring and using its features—both locally and remotely—is equally important for users like you.

Remote configuration has been a standout feature of Cogent DataHub since Version 9, enabling you to interact with a local DataHub instance running as a Windows service or remotely manage and configure any DataHub instance across your enterprise. And with security top of mind, the DataHub installs with Remote Configuration disabled by default, making it secure out-of-the-box. 

In this blog, you'll learn how to use DataHub's remote configuration tool so you can:

• Simplify configuration management across your organization by accessing multiple DataHub instances from one location.
• Avoid interruptions and enhance efficiency with the ability to make changes while the Windows service is running.
• Prevent unauthorized changes with a digitally signed one-click install over a secure TCP connection with flexible, user-configurable roles and permission sets.
• Speed up configuration with CSV Import support for OPC UA, OPC DA, Bridging, MQTT Client, Modbus and Local & External Historian.

Continue reading to learn how you can enable and set up DataHub Remote Configuration.

Streamline Operations, Improve Visibility, Enable Compliance, and Drive Success

In the highly regulated and fast-paced oil and gas industry, leveraging real-time, secure data is crucial for improving operational efficiency, ensuring safety, and meeting regulatory compliance standards. Software Toolbox delivers software solutions designed to enable data integration that is a must for the applications you use to monitor, manage, streamline and optimize operations across all sectors of the oil and gas value chain. Our solutions deliver the critical data you need, whether you're in upstream exploration, midstream pipeline management, or downstream refining.

Read the rest of the blog to learn how we can help drive your operations forward.

IoT, IIoT, MQTT, Big Data, and The Cloud—these tools and technologies are shaping the future of various industries. But how do you actually bring your critical process or control data into the cloud for real-time analytics, predictive maintenance, or smart manufacturing? That’s the most critical part, because in today’s connected world, data is power. Organizations are leveraging IoT and IIoT to optimize operations, predict maintenance issues before they happen, and unlock insights through advanced analytics in the cloud. That’s where Amazon AWS IoT Core and Cogent DataHub IoT Gateway come in.

Redundancy is a broad concept, as explored in our Demystifying Redundancy Blog. In this post, we narrow the focus on how to manage redundant OPC servers—a critical topic for ensuring reliable process communications to your HMI, SCADA, MES, Historian, etc. Redundancy is crucial because it ensures continuous operation and data integrity in the event of system failures, minimizing downtime and potential losses.

Simply deploying two OPC servers connected to your PLCs doesn’t make them redundant. We're sometimes asked about having the two OPC servers communicate and decide when to failover. That sounds good but has a flaw. If the client loses network connection to one OPC server but the two OPC servers are still communicating, and the HMI/SCADA doesn’t have any internal failover mechanism, then no failover will occur.

Secure data transmission between the Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) layers is a critical concern in industrial automation. Traditional methods often expose critical systems to vulnerabilities by opening ports on the OT level when leveraging standard OPC deployments. While OPC UA has streamlined industrial communications by eliminating the complexities of DCOM configuration and its associated security risks, the continued use of open ports still leaves potential vulnerabilities for attackers to exploit.

DataHub Tunneling has often been viewed as just another way to bypass DCOM or an alternative to OPC UA, but it is much more than that. In this blog post we’ll explore four ways Cogent DataHub, a versatile middleware software solution, can address these security challenges by leveraging its advanced tunneling capabilities and more.

Welcome back to our Data Storage Deep Dive Series, where we continue to explore innovative ways to integrate our industrial automation software solutions with enterprise-level historians. In one of our previous posts of this series, Software Toolbox Helps You Fly Higher with Canary Historian, we demonstrated how data from diverse sources could be collected using TOP Server, OmniServer and Cogent DataHub, and subsequently funneled into Canary Historian for advanced trend analysis.

Today, we’re shifting our focus to AVEVA PI System (formerly known as OSIsoft PI), a widely used data repository, and how it can be used alongside AVEVA CONNECT to gain even more value from your industrial data. This blog will showcase how you can leverage the Cogent DataHub to seamlessly integrate data into your PI System, and from there, to CONNECT Data Services, unlocking cloud-based capabilities such as visualization and advanced analytics options for your organization.

Risk is often defined as the likelihood that something will occur multiplied by the impact it would have. In the world of automation, some of those possible impacts are unexpected downtime, loss of data, theft of information, damage to people and products, and inaccurate data – not to mention the fines and penalties when government regulations are not met.

At Software Toolbox, we understand that data availability, integrity, and confidentiality are of the utmost importance. As the adoption of IIoT grows, so does network exposure, increasing the likelihood of potential security issues. Implementing safe protocols and practices are essential to mitigating these risks.