We are going to see the infrastructure of the PI System on a white board today. To start off with,
you need to realize that every PI System is pretty simple. There are three major components.
First one, there is a PI server. Now the first thing to notice with the PI server
is it's a piece of software. It's not hardware. Often we'll look at a box and be, that's the PI
server. Well not really, the PI server is a piece of software that's on a Windows operating system
which is often Windows 2008, that's more like the actual machine. That's what that is. Elsewhere,
we have another Windows operating system. And on there we have something called the PI interface.
Lastly, we have PI clients. So these are things like PI clients. This what actually provides
you and your users with data, with graphs, with some kind of access to all the information and
data that we stored in the PI server will come out in the clients. Things like PI DataLink for
spreadsheets and Microsoft Excel, PI ProcessBook. PI Coresight (now called PI Vision). And any kind
of other data access we have to the PI System. These are all ways to get data to users.
So in the end here, we have people because that's the end goal here -- we need our good people and
our enterprise to be able to see the information they want and be able to make decisions that are
relevant to your business. And all of these are just pieces of software that will exist
on their laptop or their PC or in the case of PI Coresight (now called PI Vision) are
available over the web with just any web browser. But we also have to remember,
where is the data coming from that they actually want to analyze? That
comes from way over here on the left, from data sources. So data sources, I'm referring to here,
anything that makes some kind of process data that you want to see. Maybe it's a pump.
A pump that turns on and off every day. And you just want to be able to see that through one our
tools. Or perhaps it's the temperature outside. Or maybe there is information in another database
that you want in the PI System. Or maybe there is just manual measurements out there that you
need to put into the PI System. These are all data sources. The role of these two pieces in
the middle which constitute the PI System is to get data from the data sources to the clients out
there -- the PI clients. And then to your users, so that your users can see what is happening at
the data source. And your users don't need to worry about all of this stuff in the middle.
So the first step in this is that the language of the data here isn't necessarily friendly with
the PI server. It's in its own proprietary language and there are lots of people of
equipment out there and they all format their data in different ways. So the role of the PI
interface is to translate that data, translate that data into something that can be forwarded
on to the PI server and then stored away in a PI archive. So now with this archive,
we have a whole history of all the process data for as long as we've been recording it. And this
is made possible by different PI interfaces each sending translator data and sending it to the PI
server. From there, the PI server responds to queries from clients. So DataLink will say,
PI server I want to see the last 7 days of data for that pump. And the PI server will
sort out the data and show it to the user. That is a basic PI System. There is a data
source which is not made by OSISoft, just a data source that is contacted by an interface which
sends the data to a PI server. And then there is just some way for the users to see the data.
There is a whole lot of other things we add onto this and most recently and most importantly,
we have something called PI AF. So I'm going to actually draw it in right here.
We have this problem with the PI server, was really great at its job and it's still
really great at its job. It's very machine friendly. It communicates very well with
a PI interface and then stores away the data very robustly. However for a user,
sometimes looking at how we are storing the data is a little obscure. We are using very technical
computer-like names for the points of data that we are storing and the organization of it is easy
for a computer to understand and sort through and not necessarily a human. So now we have the PI AF
server. This provides a lot of things. But one of the things for the purposes of this exercise
is that it is human friendly in exposing the organization of this data for the users
whereas the PI server is more machine friendly for communicating with all these machines over here.
And so now with PI ProcessBook, PI Coresight (now called PI Vision), PI DataLink, we can
see a human friendly chart and organization of the data and still access all the process data
over an entire history. And with this, we now have the basic PI System. This is it,
there is a server, there is an interface, there are clients and there is something
that is being reported. And that's it, that's the basic PI System.