I’m curious if anyone has hit performance or scaling problems with historian products like GE, Aspen, and OSISoft? If so, what did you do?

I know I can test the products (after talking to a sales guy), but I’m wondering if anyone has some war stories. Big data gives me big concerns, and I want to get some feel for peoples experience with these products.

I’m not asking about the SQL based historians, as I’ve heard these don’t scale.

 

With OSI PI - No. The system scales up to 10s of thousands of tags or more with no issues. We service a user with around 25000 tags over 5 physical locations. The system is small by OSI standards and works very well. The database is proprietary and very efficient. There is good support for distribution of servers and databases as well as consolidation of data in enterprise systems. Increasing system size is as easy as replacing a license file and configuring more points.

I can't comment on other vendors.

Rob.

 

Rob, thanks for the insight!

I'm probably looking at over 25K tags (maybe slightly over 50K), but it's good to hear you've had success with this.

Is 25K tags the norm or is there a norm? I know these systems get quite expensive as the tag count rises...

JJ

 

For a comparison of PI with other systems you could start here http://www.rjksolutionsltd.co.uk/forum/ There are also some other discussion threads here on control.com

I think there probably is no "norm". 50K tags on a single server does sound quite large, but really its the data collection rate and number of interfaces rather than the number of tags you want to store. With current disk sizes you are more likely to run out of Disk controller capacity before you run into database size problems. Certainly 50K tags is a system size PI should be able to handle easily.

As for cost, No, OSI PI is not cheap. Every PI user I've ever worked with complains about the price, but they are all happy with the product.

 

While our PI system is quite small by comparison (around 500 tags), the data base performance is excellent. However, our PI system was sold through a 3rd party vendor....and this can problematic. PI will not support it, since they did not directly sell it. There can be add-ins and options that are not supplied by the third party vendor....which of course leaves the end user in a bind...caveat emptor!

Cheers
Gerald Beaudoin

 

Gerald,

I've read this somewhere else, specifically OSI PI provided by Rockwell. Thanks for the warning!

JJ