A new product release from Citect allows manufacturers to provide hybrid solutions of centralised and distributed control coupled with rapid change deployment.
The launch of CitectSCADA V7.0 helps industrial companies of all sizes improve agility in both engineering and runtime operations by allowing them to design architectures that significantly enhance performance and lower the cost of ownership. This release offers the latest in advanced clustering technology to help safeguard plant reliability and rapid change deployment as well as a number of enhancements to help increase security and maximise engineering productivity. Manufacturers can now put local systems and centralised servers into redundant pairs, giving the benefits of standardisation through the use of a single configuration across all displays while at the same time locating alarms, reports, trends and I/O servers local to the process they control.”
V7.0 provides companies with many new architecture options, such as supporting clustering across multiple sites. It also provides hybrid solutions of centralised and distributed control; with the ability to pair many local control servers with a single central standby server or to simply segment the control system on the same hardware to add separation between parts of the control system to reduce the impact of system expansion.
The platform also helps provide standardisation and a single point of change when CitectSCADA is used as the central control system and on local control panels.
Customers also benefit from the improved licensing included in this version. The same project configuration can be used across an entire site, but only the tags used at each operator display are counted.
“The new architecture elements are the first step in our significant product improvement strategy,” said Stephen Flannigan, global director, CitectSCADA. “The clustering enhancements continue to build on our existing reliable, high performance and flexible control system while opening many new and exciting possibilities for our customers. Most importantly, we are doing this while keeping our upgrade path, so our existing customers can benefit from these enhancements without having to completely reconfigure their control systems.”
Advanced clustering technology allows users to:
* Provide a seamless operator view across existing control systems.
* Offer a combination of control (including alarms, reports and trends), local to the process, paired with a central standby server.
* Support additional processing for expansion requirements by simply adding a new server to the control system.
* Segment the control system to ensure changes in one business unit do not affect others.
* Connect to multiple control systems to analyse alarms and trend data directly from the scada systems.
* Use cluster swapping to re-use graphics screens between matching systems or for simulation or replay.
Rapid change deployment allows users to:
* Roll out changes to graphics screens without restart.
* Permit changes, without client restart, to alarms, trends and reports.
* Deploy changes to the entire system in a single step.
Other enhancements
* Increased network fault tolerance support with the addition of TCP/IP support.
* Greater communication control with priority levels for standby communication paths.
* Reduced code overhead by processing code only when tags change.
* Simplified logging of user actions.
* Support for MS Windows XP-embedded.
* Support for virtual machine environments.
* New dynamic-point licensing whereby customers only pay for the points they use.
For more information contact Dennis Cox, Citect Africa, +27 (0)11 699 6600, [email protected], www.citect.com
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