The PI System is all about collecting data from
a variety of sources in an intelligent way, and
making that data available to clients. So, as you can see
in the illustration here we typically talk about these data
sources being things like,
oh, control systems you'd find in a plant or a
process environment. But nowadays the data source can really be
a variety of things, even IT resources,
a type of Windows performance
metrics that you'd, you get from some of our interfaces.
The data sources are obviously the
source of the data that we're going to end up storing and
displaying to people. We typically have interface
nodes that are involved in the collection of that data.
Now that's not always the case. It's a very good design
and we strongly recommend it, but, technically, it
is possible that you would do the, or run
these interfaces on the PI Server itself.
Although, typically, we don't recommend that
because, of course, if you're trying to do real time data
collection, it's not a good idea to do that on a machine like
the PI Server that's prone to the kind of spikes
in usage that you would see users would create
if they go off and start doing things all of a sudden.
Now once that data is collected on this
interface node, optionally, as I mentioned, and
sent over to the PI Server, there it's,
it's collected in such way, and served up in such a
way, the different client applications, both just
regular user client applications you'd find in a Windows environment,
also thin clients that you'd find in a web environment,
or data access clients - things like
relational database-type queries using SQL queries
using our PI OLE DB provider. We
make that data available to all those clients.
If you do have asset
data, kind of asset database-type information,
that you'd like to make use of so that people have
a different way of navigating to your structures
you can implement those structures in
what we call our PI A or our AF Server.
And that actually can be located on a second machine.
So that's the
quick tour. Now let's go into some more detail
if you want. So, we connect to the data,
this data source using
our interfaces. These interfaces are
smart interfaces, and by that I mean
they can be interfaces that
will auto-configure in some cases.
They're basically using some kind of buffering optionally
so that if you have a disconnect between the interfaces
and this server here, we can
buffer data locally and then unspool
that data when the, when the connection is restored.
So, we connect,
we integrate that data, we store that data on
a server, and once that data's stored we can apply
all kinds of interesting analytics to that - calculations,
things like that, statistical quality control,
ad hoc calculations, calculations
based on some predefined
aggregations like totalizations, or
analysis that's based more on just kind of open-ended
expression syntax that you write yourself
using either Visual Basic
or visualbasic.net. And then finally,
the visualization layer, of course, is where we take all that
information and we present it. And we have different mechanisms to
doing that as I mentioned, thin clients, etc.
Now let's take a look in more detail at the interfaces themselves.
As I said, this PI System,
it connects with these real-time data sources and this, of course,
is something that's done in real time, so
the types of scanning that you'd
be doing on these data sources can be by the second,
or the minute, we even support sub-second, etc.,
and then we store that data on the server which we'll see in a second.
So, the point is, we have these inter-
faces of for more than 400 different
systems and different data sources,
basically right out of the box. You install
PI, you install one of the many different interfaces,
and you're starting to gather data right away.
Now, so far I've been talking about the off-the-shelf
interfaces and those would be the interfaces to
these different systems like distributed control
systems, programmable logic controllers, skater systems,
OPC-compliant devices, any third
party devices. In any event, those are the kind of
the off-the-shelf ones, that ones that have already been developed. Now, in addition,
there are mechanisms for developing
custom applications. We do have an SDK, a
Software Development Kit, an API, an Application Programming Interface,
that allows you to get access
or allows developers to get access to
PI Server in a read and write fashion.
What we strongly recommend for most developers is our
related data -- relational database access tools
using industry standards like OLE DB. We also
make available access to the
PI Server through Web Services. And rounding out the
picture would be our ERP, the Enterprise
Resource Planning Interfaces we do support, and also
relatively new is some of the Power
Meter Interfaces we're getting for our
Advanced Metering Infrastructure projects.
And I mentioned once before that
if you've got Windows Metrics or SNMP Metrics
you can actually retrieve data from those
Windows Performance Counters, bring those into the PI Server as well.
So that's a summary of what we can
read from, we put that data that we read
into the Server. The Server's infinitely
capable of storing this data. It stores it and retrieves it very,
very fast. Of course, we have very small
footprint in terms of disc space, and we're optimized for
retrieval. So, just to give you an example: if you wanted to bring in 3
days of data from, say, 10 years
ago, it wouldn't take you any longer than 3 days of data
from 2 days ago. Now the Server does
feature high availability in that we do have,
you know, specific components written so that we
implement failover, and we also implement
security. This is a security that's based on Windows
Security, and that's available as well as the traditional
PI-oriented security. This, of course, is
accessible that, in that
anybody around the world, with the right credentials, can
get access to that using thin clients or the
rich clients that we have, and it's reliable.
We have a very strong up-time. The architecture, the
system by its very nature has a kind of
failover in, in that the interfaces can
buffer data, and that's a technology that's been beat on
for 20 years now. It's very, very reliable. It saves a lot
of people a lot of data. So that's,
there's just some of the features of our PI Server.
Now all of these would be things that we would categorize as part of our
PI Archive. That's what we're calling
the Server. Now The Analytics portion
are those things that, that we would do
in line of calculations like, for example,
we have equations like if you're doing
inventory management or
Yoda counting and you need expressions
that are open-ended, we have both Performance Equations and
ACE, our Advanced Computing Engine, for doing those kinds of,
you know, equation-based calculations. Now we also
can do Reporting, we can do Notifications
through e-mail based on certain criteria,
so if, if X goes above 50
send an e-mail and then escalate that to two or three people
until we get an acknowledgment. That type of thing.
And one other thing. We do support real-time statistical
quality control as well as a simple
alarming type of PI Point type.
And, finally, we come to The Visuals. The Visuals are, of course, how we
present the information to the world. We have, probably our
flagship client application, PI ProcessBook. It's an
application for displaying data which will be the focus
of much of this class. We have add-ins to
Excel for bringing data into
Excel so that people can do analysis or reports.
RT, or excuse me, our PI WebParts Product,
it makes use of Microsoft Office SharePoint.
And then, likewise, for those of you who are using the
SAP Enterprise Portal, we have a mechanism to
present the data through that Portal as well. So those are
in general terms. Specifically we do have
individual applications for looking at things like
manual inputs and doing manual inputs, statistical quality
control. We have different options for looking at this data
on the Web. I should point out,
also, that ProcessBook has a number of add-ins to support things like
Batch, and so does DataLink. And,
we do support the latest from Microsoft, this DataLink
Excel, excuse me, the Microsoft Excel
Services that allow you to put Excel spreadsheets on a WebPage
and we support that through DataLink.