by Gary Mintchell | Jun 17, 2019 | Manufacturing IT, Software
Digitalization requires digital data, which in turn requires a place to robustly store that data. This place is most often the cloud these days. OSIsoft PI System must be the most widely used industrial database. The company has released OSIsoft Cloud Services—a cloud-native, real-time data management system for unifying and augmenting critical operations data from across an organization to accelerate industrial analytics, data science projects, data sharing, and other digital transformation initiatives.
OCS highlights and capabilities:
- Data sharing – partner companies can access a shared data stream to remotely monitor technology
- Functionality – seamless crossover between the PI System and OCS to compare facilities, perform root cause analysis and run hypotheticals
- Scalability – tests proved OCS can simultaneously manage over two billion data streams, and safely share information with partners
- Petuum uses OCS to stream historical data and live data on production, temperature and variability to its AI platform to assist Cemex, a global cement manufacturer, improve yield and energy to 7% from 2%.
- DERNetSoft uses OCS to aggregate data in one place, allowing users to access useful analytics for ways to reduce power and save money.
- Pharma companies will use OCS to give a regulator access to anonymized drug testing or production, without risk of unauthorized users in the manufacturing networks.
With OCS, an engineer at a chemical producer, for example, could combine maintenance and energy data from multiple facilities into a live superset of information to boost production in real-time while planning analysts could merge several years’ worth of output and yield data to create a ‘perfect plant’ model for capital forecasts.
OCS can also be leveraged by software developers and system integrators to build new applications and services or to link remote assets.
“OSIsoft Cloud Services is a fundamental part of our mission to help people get the most out of the data that is at the foundation of their business. We want their cost of curiosity to be as close to zero as possible,” said Gregg Le Blanc, Vice President of Product at OSIsoft. “OCS is designed to complement the PI System by giving customers a way to uncover new operational insights and use their data to solve new problems that would have been impractical or impossible before.”
The Data Dilemma
Critical operations data—i.e. data generated by production lines, safety equipment, grids, and other systems essential to a company’s survival—is part of one of the fastest growing segments in the data universe. IDC and Seagate estimate in “Data Age 2025: The Evolution of Data to Life Critical” that “hypercritical” data for applications such as distributed control systems is growing by 54% a year and will constitute 10% of all data by 2025 while real-time data will nearly double to more than 25% of all data.
Critical operations data, however, can be extremely difficult to manage or use.
Data scientists spend 50 percent or more of their time curating large data sets instead of conducting analytics. IT teams get bogged down in managing VPNs for third parties or writing code for basic administrative tasks. Data becomes inaccessible and locked in silos. Over 1,000 utilities, 80% of the largest oil and gas companies, and 65% of the Fortune 500 industrial companies already use the PI System to harness critical operations data, turning it into an asset for improving productivity, saving money, and developing new services.
Natively compatible with the PI System, OCS extends the range of possible applications and use cases of OSIsoft’s data infrastructure while eliminating the challenges of capturing, managing, enhancing, and delivering operations data across an organization. Within a few hours, thousands of data streams containing years of historical data can be transferred to OCS, allowing customers to explore, experiment, and share large data sets the same day.
Two Billion Data Streams
The core of OCS is a highly scalable sequential data store optimized for time series data, depth measurements, temperature readings, and similar data. OSIsoft has also embedded numerous usability features for connecting devices, managing users, searching, transferring data from the PI System to OCS, and other functions. OCS can also accept data from devices outside of traditional control networks or other sources.
“The scale and scope of data that will be generated over the coming decades is unprecedented, but our mission remains the same,” said Dr. J. Patrick Kennedy, CEO and Founder of OSIsoft. “OSIsoft Cloud Services represent the latest step in a nearly 40 year journey and there’s more to come.”
To test the scalability and stability of OCS, OSIsoft created a deployment that contained the equivalent of the data generated by all of the smart meters in the U.S. over the last two years, or two billion data streams (100 million meters with 20 data streams each). OCS successfully stored up to 1.2 billion data points per hour and was managing all two billion streams simultaneously within 48 hours.
PaaS for OSIsoft Marketplace Partners
Software developers are already creating services based around OCS. DERNetSoft is creating a secure marketplace for sharing utility and electric power data to improve energy forecasts and peak shaving strategies. Meanwhile, others are collaborating with customers on efforts to bolster well integrity at oil drilling sites, pinpoint tank leakage, predict maintenance problems, and reduce energy consumption with OCS. OSIsoft partners developing OCS services include Petuum, Seeq, Toumetis, Transpara, Aperio, and TrendMiner. These services will be available from OSIsoft marketplace as they are released.
“Digital transformation requires the ability to compare data and outcomes across multiple plants and data sources,” says Michael Risse, VP/CMO at Seeq. “OCS is a unified solution for process manufacturing customers to enable this type of analysis, generating predictive insights on thousands of assets across company operations to improve production outcomes.”
Pricing and Availability
OCS is a subscription service currently available to customers and partners for use in facilities in North America. OCS will be extended to Europe and to other regions in the near future.
Pricing is based on the average number of data streams accessed, rather than the unique data streams stored, giving customers the freedom to experiment more freely with their data without incurring added costs..
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 27, 2018 | Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Software
I’m still deep in cyber security meetings in Germany. A pause here for software and cloud news from the west coast of America—OSIsoft and Amazon Web services. Since PI is used by many industrial companies, these announcements reveal the deep acceptance of cloud technologies.
In short, here are three bullets:
- AWS Quick Starts for PI System: enables industrial customers to quickly deploy and manage the PI System on AWS.
- PI Integrator for Business Analytics: optimized for AWS to reduce time and cost of bringing operational and IoT data to AWS for sharing or advanced analytics.
- Enhanced connectivity and data sharing to accelerate digital transformation and shrink the OT-IT gap.
OSIsoft launched a suite of products today designed to enable manufacturers, utilities, and other industrial customers to run the OSIsoft PI System on Amazon Web Services.
AWS Quick Starts for the PI System consists of AWS CloudFormation templates, scripts, and reference architectures for quickly spinning up and managing a fully functioning PI System on AWS. Customers will use the PI System Quick Starts for moving PI System workloads to the AWS cloud or for providing an aggregate PI System across an enterprise, monitoring remote or isolated assets and enabling data science efforts.
The PI Integrator for Business Analytics, meanwhile, has been optimized to extract, clean and transmit data from PI Systems and reduce data preparation tasks that bog down big data and data science initiatives. Some customers have successfully used PI Integrator technology to reduce the time consumed by data preparation in advanced analytics projects by over 90%.
AWS Quick Starts will be available in 2019. PI Integrator for Business Analytics, previewed at Hannover Messe earlier this year, is available this month.
Under the Hood
Quick Starts are built by AWS solutions architects and partners to help deploy solutions on AWS, based on AWS best practices for security and high availability. These reference deployments implement key technologies automatically on the AWS Cloud, often with a single click and in less than an hour. You can build your test or production environment in a few steps, and start using it immediately.
The PI Integrator for Business Analytics can integrate to Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, enabling industrial customers to speed up their data science experiments, combine disparate data sets for business intelligence, and operationalize the outcomes of advanced analytics that augment decision making.
The Life of the PI System
OSIsoft’s PI System transforms the vast number of operational data streams from sensors, devices and industrial processes into rich, real-time insights to help people save money, increase productivity or create connected products and services.
The PI System can be found inside thousands of companies and complex industrial sites around the globe. OSIsoft customers have used PI System technology to predict wind turbine failures, increase output at an iron mine by $120 million in a single year by fine-tuning logistics, reduce the power consumed by a supercomputer center at a national laboratory, deliver water services to millions of new customers in a major metropolitan city, transform how medicines are produced and reduce the time and expense and improve the quality and consistency of beer. Over 1,000 leading utilities, 90% of the world’s largest oil and gas companies and 65% of the Fortune 500 industrial companies rely the PI System in their operations.
“Worldwide, over 2 billion sensor-based data streams are managed by the PI System with some customers monitoring over 25 million data streams.
“Data from operations—the information being generated by chemical reactors, transformers and other industrial devices—is incredibly valuable. Operations data will be the most valuable asset companies have for moving ahead of the competition in the future. Until recently, this data has been mostly confined to the factory floor or production line in part because of the size, scope and complexity of the data generated by operations,” said John Baier, Director of Integration Technologies, Cloud Analytics Practice at OSIsoft. “Working with Amazon Web Services, we want to unlock the value of operations data by eliminating barriers and bringing it to as many people as possible.”
www.osisoft.com
by Gary Mintchell | May 4, 2016 | Automation, News, Operations Management
Hannover Messe 2016 industrial trade fair was large, busy, cold and rainy, and exciting. Several news items are posted below including items from OPC Foundation, PI International, Beckhoff Automation, and a new-ish security company C-Labs.
Most of the news and analysis of Siemens was published on Thursday. The next post will document the highlights with analysis of the Dell Internet of Things Think Tank that I was privileged to moderate.
Panel discussion—Industrie 4.0 meets Internet of Things
One area of Halle 8 was set aside for a continuous stream of presentations mostly around “Industrie 4.0 Meets Internet of Things. I stopped by a few times. One of the first panels featured a couple of views.
The moderator posed the topic question as a Germany vs. US debate. The panelists refused to sink that low. They did offer a couple of interesting insights. Harel Kodesh of GE talked of the need to experiment. The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) is working on a test bed. He said to let industry learn how to build standards—there needs to be a global standard—then see about building platform.
Prof. Siegfried Russwurm of Siemens said, “This is not an either/or. The consumer Internet is big in the US due to scale of the US consumer market. For Industrial Internet, Middle Europe is used to making things so that emphasis on the Industrial Internet of Things is more natural.” In an insightful conclusion, Russwurm mentioned, “Customers don’t like monopolies. We will see competing platforms.”
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OPC in the World
Monday at Hannover Messe 2016, Microsoft Corp. announced it is working with the OPC Foundation to enable virtually any industrial Internet of Things (IoT) scenario through interoperability between the millions of applications and industrial equipment compliant with the OPC UA standard. Microsoft will further enable its industrial IoT customers to connect a broad range of manufacturing equipment and software that can span decades of investment with extended support of the OPC UA open source software stack.
Interoperability between devices and assets is critical for today’s factories, which are increasingly bringing new and legacy systems online and modernizing their plants and facilities. OPC UA provides a standardized communication, security, and metadata and semantics abstraction for the majority of industrial equipment. It also serves as a gateway to cloud-enabled industrial equipment, including data and device management, insights, and machine learning capabilities for equipment that was not designed with these capabilities built in.
Microsoft’s extended support for the OPC UA open source software stack spans its IoT offerings, from local connectivity with Windows devices to cloud connectivity via the Microsoft Azure platform. Integration with Azure IoT allows customers to easily send OPC UA telemetry data to the Azure cloud, as well as to command and control their OPC UA devices remotely from the Azure cloud. In addition, Windows 10 devices running the Universal Windows Platform can connect and openly communicate with other IoT devices via OPC UA.
“As Industry 4.0 reaches a tipping point, we believe that openness and interoperability between hardware, software and services will help manufacturers transform how they operate and create solutions that benefit employees’ productivity,” said Sam George, director, Azure Internet of Things at Microsoft. “Microsoft’s support of OPC UA in Azure IoT and Windows IoT will reduce barriers to industrial IoT adoption and help deliver immediate value.”
Meanwhile OPC Foundation announced more organizational collaboration ventures.
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Beckhoff Automation Reports Results
Beckhoff Automation posted global annual revenue of 620 million euros in 2015, an increase of 22 percent. This follows a similarly successful 2014 financial year in which sales rose by 17 percent. Managing Director Hans Beckhoff was very satisfied with the company’s development: “We won market share and grew much faster compared to the market as a whole. Our PC Control technology is increasingly the acknowledged market standard, and we are winning new customers worldwide with this extremely powerful technology.”
Beckhoff explained that the favorable euro exchange rate naturally helped increase growth, as with all German manufacturers who export a large share of what they make, but added that, even after revising the figure to compensate for exchange rate influences, the resulting growth rate is still an impressive 17 percent.
Beckhoff is well-represented in more than 75 countries with 34 subsidiary companies and distributors. Exports in 2015 accounted for 65 percent of total sales. “Asia is contributing strongly to our growth,” said Hans Beckhoff. “However, subsidiaries in southern Europe and North America are also performing quite well.”
Hans Beckhoff maintains an optimistic outlook on 2016 and anticipates continued double-digit sales growth: “We have strong and growing levels of incoming orders.” In order to prepare the company for this expected growth, the campus at the company headquarters in Verl will be expanded by a further 27,000 sq meters in 2016. Existing neighboring industrial buildings have already been leased for this purpose and, after being renovated, will provide additional storage and production space in the second half of the year. “This appropriately prepares us for two further years of strong growth in terms of production output,” says a confident Hans Beckhoff.
Beckhoff North America contributed to these results with an increase in revenue of 6.5 percent which followed a 16.2 percent revenue increase at the end of 2014. These positive business developments from Beckhoff North America were reported at a press conference held at Hannover Messe 2016 – the first year ever that the USA has been highlighted as the official partner country at the world’s largest industrial trade show. The intense growth in revenue was fueled by a number of factors in the North American market, including robust automation and controls purchasing from the existing customer base and several significant new customer contracts, including dramatic increases on the part of major consumer products manufacturers. “Beckhoff North America also drove double digit growth in terms of order in-flow in 2014 and 2015,” reports Aurelio Banda, CEO and President of Beckhoff North America. “We expect this encouraging trend to continue throughout the 2016 financial year, resulting in further strong results.”
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OMG statement with OPC
One of the many organizational collaborations for OPC Foundation is the Object Management Group (OMG). This collaboration brings together two protocols previously thought to be competitive. Stan Schneider, CEO of RTI and spokesperson for OMG, talked with me about the situation of DDS and OPC UA. He told me there is no competition between the two. With the new OPC UA publish/subscribe specification, OPC UA can use DDS in the same manner of UDP. The collaboration is in active development.
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PI News
At the end of last year, PI (PROFIBUS & PROFINET International) established a new “I4.0” working group with the goal of preparing use cases relevant for Industrie 4.0 from the perspective of industrial communication. On this basis, existing and new technologies will be assessed from the standpoint of use in Industrie 4.0 production systems and the standardization environment will be analyzed. The working group will identify requirements for communication that are important in the Industrie 4.0 environment and bring them to standardization consistently as further development of PI technologies.
As one of the first results, a new sub-project is now being started for specific measures for the merging of IT (Information Technology) and OT (Operations Technology). IT networks and production networks are increasingly growing together. In the past, however, they were always identified by different characteristics. For example, IT networks mainly handle large bandwidths and connect different locations, while production networks mainly feature high performance and short latencies. With TSN (Time Sensitive Networking), technologies are now being developed in the IEEE that will connect the bandwidth of IT networks with the latency of OT networks.
A distinction of PROFINET is that it relies on standard IT technology while satisfying stringent real-time requirements. PI sees a large opportunity to combine the strengths of PROFINET and TSN and to generate further added value from this for customers, thereby setting PROFINET on a future-oriented foundation for Industrie 4.0. The combination will also yield versatile use of new TSN-capable standard Ethernet blocks for manufacturers of PROFINET devices. Proven PROFINET services, profiles, and user interfaces, such as diagnostics, alarms, PROFIsafe, and PROFIdrive remain unchanged for the user. PROFINET already provides a very good starting position for the use of TSN mechanisms. The convergence of real-time-capable traffic with IP-based traffic, which will increase significantly in Industrie 4.0 applications, is already firmly anchored in the PROFINET architecture today. In addition, new ideas discussed in the IEEE, such as establishment of real-time-capable dynamic ad-hoc connections, can be integrated. PROFINET is thus a consistent participant in the further development in the IEEE.
For this reason, PI will actively advance the further development of TSN and point out ways this technology can be used in PROFINET networks. In doing so, special attention will obviously be given to a seamless transition for today’s installations so that users have an easy path to TSN-based networks. First results of the working group can be expected at SPS/IPC/Drives 2016.
Other topics such as the use of OPC UA and expanded access to asset management data are also needed for implementation of Industrie 4.0 applications and are being actively advanced by the I4.0 working group.
The annual determination of the installed base of the portfolio of PI (PROFIBUS & PROFINET International) continues to show a growing acceptance in the market. The numbers for PROFINET and PROFIsafe are still very pleasing. IO-Link is exhibiting a strongly accelerated growth. The somewhat leveling-off growth of PROFIBUS and simultaneous surge of PROFINET is evidence that Ethernet-based communication is starting to replace conventional fieldbus technology in production automation. The positive trend of PROFIBUS in process automation continues, in contrast.
Three million PROFINET devices were brought into the market in 2015. The total number at the end of 2015 was 12.8 million devices, which represents a 30% increase in the installed base over the previous year. In the case of PROFIsafe, 1.3 million nodes were brought into the market in 2015, increasing the installed base by more than 30% to a total of 5.5 million PROFIsafe nodes. The growth trend is thus continuing at a high level. IO-Link experienced the greatest increase this year with 63%. The total number of installed IO-Link devices is now more than 3.6 million. A total of 2.8 million PROFIBUS devices were brought into the market in 2015.
Karsten Schneider, Chairman of PI (PROFIBUS & PROFINET International) , views the latest projection of node counts very positively. “For the first time in the history of PROFINET, its numbers exceed those for PROFIBUS. This demonstrates the positive trend for the PI technologies, not least because Industrie 4.0 means that the future belongs to Ethernet systems. With its total number of well over 50 million, PROFIBUS is the absolute world market leader. Beating a world market leader is an art. And the fact that this was done – for the first time over this past year – by PROFIBUS’s in-house competitor PROFINET is an unmistakable sign that the future belongs to our technologies.”
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C-Labs Security Solution Gains Acceptance
C-Labs, an industrial Internet of Things (IoT) software developer, today announced that its Factory-Relay software was selected by AXOOM for use in industrial automation products. C-Labs also announced that its Factory-Relay software was selected by Nebbiolo Technologies for use in its Fog Computing System for process automation.
“We’re thrilled that AXOOM and Nebbiolo selected C-Labs to advance their industrial IoT solutions,” said Chris Muench, C-Labs CEO. “These customer and partnership wins underscore industry demand for secure, simple and integrated IoT solutions that work right out of the box.”
Industrial IoT is estimated to become a $151 billion market by 2020 but security and complexity are slowing adoption. A Cisco survey of more than 7,000 global executives shows that the leading obstacles to adopting industrial IoT are threats to data or physical security; followed closely by inability of IT systems to keep up with change. C-Labs was founded to deliver the most secure and simplest to deploy factory automation software.
“We selected C-Labs software for its multilayered security and simplified deployment and operations,” said Florian Weigmann, Managing Director, AXOOM. “IoT is one of the greatest opportunities for our customers and C-Labs helps us deliver it securely and easily.”
Security and IT policy integration were key factors in Nebbiolo’s selection of C-Labs Factory-Relay software. Factory-Relay automatically provisions a user interface that can replicate the factory equipment HMI on a smartphone, tablet or PC, removing an onerous integration step and making factory IoT automation simpler to deploy. “C-Labs extends our reach to a broader range of industrial equipment and protocols such as OPC UA, and simplifies the creation of industrial IoT solutions,” said Flavio Bonomi, CEO and Co-Founder of Nebbiolo Technologies. Security, IT policy and ease of deployment are the issues holding back industrial IoT according to industry analyst firm ARC Advisory Group.
“Industrial IoT has proven its value for factories and industrial infrastructure, but companies need solutions that are secure and easy to deploy; that bridge OT, IT, and mobile environments; and provide rapid application development,” said Greg Gorbach, vice president, ARC Advisory Group. “C-Labs solutions focus on all of these.” “Customers told us they needed to adapt and extend IoT deployments without sacrificing security or requiring significant training for either operations technology or information technology (IT) teams,” said Muench. “Our patent-pending approach provides a secure and IT compliant connection point among previously incompatible protocols.”
