Summary
VA Historian combines the ability to store ultra high-speed logic analyser data sources with traditional high-speed data acquisition from industrial systems. It features a time-series database incorporating a traditional relational database engine, facilitating access to plant data using open database standards. With advanced data storage and compression techniques, data history is accurately represented for any time period with extremely fast data access, including multi-year aggregated data.
Business Value
A continuous and accurate operational history provides a foundation for faster troubleshooting and easier discovery of high-value process improvement opportunities. High availability clusters ensure the continuous retention of valuable data for the plant's lifespan. Comprehensive reporting and data
analysis options enable insights into your process, alarm, and event data for more informed decisions.
Data Integrity
The data collection process combines multiple data sources from disparate systems, including standard protocols such as OPC UA, OPC DA, MQTT, and proprietary protocols to classic SIEMENS or ABB DCS. Low bandwidth remote facilities have an optimized network protocol with store and forward capability to cover communication unreliability. By default, all incoming data is timestamped at the source with a common time synchronization method.
Data can be out of temporal sequence between distributed data sources and is continuously stored in a coherent time domain. Each data point has a value and quality association, which is evaluated during the processing and querying of the data set.
Continuity
The VA Historian is capable of monitoring and archiving critical infrastructure data without any downtime. Typically, systems run 24/7 for years and have a modular software architecture that prioritizes the storage of data in case of any failure.
A clustered network data storage capability increases resilience to storage media failure by replicating the storage. Decentralized store-and-forward data collectors bridge unreliable networks with buffering of data even for extended periods.
Performance
To achieve the capability of incorporating ultra high-speed logic analyser waveforms with a 1-nanosecond time resolution and traditional high-speed data at a 1-millisecond resolution, a decentralized data collector concept is used. This facilitates the off-loading of specific data source protocols and optimizes the network traffic to the VA Historian. Data collectors may be physical or virtualized components with Linux or Windows operating systems.
To achieve a responsive experience for VA clients, a hybrid memory and persistent storage architecture is used. VA clients achieve real-time data monitoring capability with minimal latency. The data storage footprint is a fraction of what traditional relational databases require and is optimized for data fidelity and data access speed, facilitating upstream data analytics applications.
With ultra high-speed data storage capabilities, transient data from specialized hardware can be analysed together with high-volume process data.
A typical scenario involves the continuous monitoring of a group of inputs at an oversampling rate, which have triggers for predefined criteria. At the trigger point, data from a predefined period before and after the trigger is stored with the highest sampling rate possible as transient data. Outside the trigger point, data is stored at a nominal aggregated rate for long-term storage.
Scalability
Each individual VA Historian system supports up to 1 million tags which is sufficient for many complex on-premise sites. For enterprise fleet solutions it is possible to consolidate cross site access to full resolution data or a hybrid cloud solution with reduced or aggregated data.
The core historian database is truly multi-platform with support for Windows and Linux on Intel x64 or ARM64 processors. Using multi-core ARM processors, it is possible to utilise cost effective platforms for compact historian systems while clustering increases data storage resilience and improves throughput
Data Visualisation and Reporting
Using the data is just as important as storing it. For this purpose, the VA View desktop client and VA Web client provide data trends and reports. Graphical representation of process screens and dashboards allows critical information or KPIs to be available in a simple web interface...
Advanced data retrieval capabilities provide fast and concise result sets for reporting or viewing.
For more info please download our brochure.
