ABB OS500 upgrade

W

Thread Starter

Will P.

Hi

We have ABB Advant Control system comprising AC450, AC160 controllers and OS500 HMI system running on MB300 network.

OS500 HMI is using HP B180L workstations and we would like to upgrade to the newer B2600 workstations, but we are not quite confident in doing that because we are unsure about following things.

1. We use ABB RTA Board PU513V2, is it going to be compatible with B2600?

2. We use tape drives as a backup media, does B2600 has compatibility with Tape drives?

3. What backup methods can be used to image the hard drive?, we currently use ignite backup on tapes.

Any information will be helpful.
Thanks
Will P.
 
Will, I will attempt to give you some answers to your questions, or at least what my experience has been.

In short I believe you should be able to upgrade to a newer workstation similar to the B2600 or otherwise. It most likely will depend on what version of Unix OS you are using, and what type of connection your RTA board has.

I recently purchased a refurbished HP C3600 Unix machine from On Queue computers. There are other vendors out there doing the same thing as On Queue, basically purchasing older machines and refurbishing them. You can also find some good prices on Ebay if you know exactly what you need. I would urge you to make contact with some of these individuals as they can help guide you to what you need in a replacement machine.

As far as you tape drive I think any of the machines should work for the tape backup as long as it has the external SCSI connection.
I can tell you that ABB now has a bit of software called extensions that allows you to backup your hard drive on the existing hard drive if it has space, or move it to an Xterminal machine. It is much faster than the old tape system, typical backup can be done in less than 10 minutes.

Again I would urge you to make contact with some vendors out there and check pricing on newer machines, and get help with options. Also if you have any sort of service contract with ABB they are also very helpful. Good luck in you endeavor.
 
Thanks for the reply.

As you mentioned, I have contacted On-Queue and following with them currently.

You said that we can image hard drive using x-terminal, can you please elaborate on that?

As far as I know ABB's extensions are limited to the station backup but not for HDD imaging.is that true?

Thanks
Will P.
 
Will,

you are correct that the extensions program only backs up the ABB station settings, graphics etc. I do not know of a way to image a Unix hard drive like you can a windows machine. For the windows machines I use Acronis, if there was something like that for unix it would be a great tool. For me I have used the extensions to backup all station files. I then use the x-terminal to transfer the backup file from the OS500 station and store it on the Windows machine. I can then install a new hard drive in the OS500 and reload the ABB software. The restore of configurable data from the backup using extensions takes considerably less time than with the tape drive.
 
S

Stephan Blaas

Hi Will,

Unfortunately the old RTA board won't work in the newer B2600 machine, you would also need the newer RTA board PU515 or PU515A. (old isa instead of scsi interface).

Seed me an email if you need more help.

I have done OS upgrades for various clients and would be happy to help.

Regards
Stephan Blaas
 
I'm late to the party here.. the best controller that will work with the PU513 EISA are the B180 (b-class) C360 (c-class) and J2240 (J-class) To give you an idea, we sell these (with out the RTA card) for $1,650.00

HP 9000 C360 Workstation
256MB Memory
1 x 9GB Internal Disk Drive
1 x Graphics card
1 x PCI / GSC back-plane board with EISA (EISA for the RTA card)
HP-UX 10.20 loaded

Hope that helps

Jesse
Cypress Technology Inc
 
Most everything you have read in these posts is true. B2600 is becoming difficult to locate. We carry excellent machines equal to that performance.

You need to be running 1.8/4 or later to use machines after the B180L. Contact us off forum at [email protected] for complete details.
 
T

Tony R. Gunderman

Will,

One potential method to create a hard drive image on another spare drive for quick recovery is to use the UNIX dd command to copy one drive to another. Consider this a lifeboat approach because it definitely is not a supported method. However, it seems to work pretty well for operator stations (B2600 and C3600) and such. You will create a "dirty copy", but we have always had it work when it boots up and the automatic fsck's are done on the filesystem.

Install a second drive in the machine that is at least as big as the one you are copying. If your boot disk is /dev/rdsk/c0t6d0 and your target lifeboat disk is /dev/rdsk/c1t5d0, then the command would be

dd if=/dev/rdsk/c0t6d0 bs=256k of=/dev/rdsk/c1t5d0

We have done this when the station was offline and disconnected from the DCN so that it is as "quiet" as possible.

Park the spare off somewhere and, if you have a drive crash, slap it in the slot for the boot drive and you can get back up fairly quickly.

I'm not much of a UNIX person, so I cannot speak to the pros and cons of doing this. Other more experienced persons may have a good reason not to do this. I just know that it can save a lot of time as opposed to loading a box from scratch.

Tony R. Gunderman
 
C
I did backups that way for years and it worked when needed. But there
are programs such as G4L and similar that can do this across a network and offer conveniences like only copying used sectors and using compression to make this much faster on both backup and restore. And I am a *NIX person, so I will say there are some gotchas that the programs handle better than raw dd. But it is amazing how much you can do with the standard UNIX utilities. So much so that I feel completely without tools when I have to work on Windows. If you can stand the downtime, it's safer to to this on a quiescent partition.

Regards
cww
 
Will,

This sure sounds like a power plant installation, perhaps with a Alstom trane, running a gas turbine?

If you have B180L workstations now, running 1.7 or early 1.8 with APC, then there are some important things you need to understand before considering a workstation upgrade.

To buy a workstation from someone who simply loads HPUNIX 10.20 will not work. There are important patches not included.
We would like to communicate with you via email to : [email protected].

It is important that you hold off on any workstation purchase, especially from any source that does not understand your needs.

Please contact us.
Thank you.
 
S

Salvador Banos

Hi,

I'm not sure if you'd be interested, but I have developed an HMI system using an OPC Server and Cimplicity 8.2 HMI software that interacts with the AC450 controllers and can basically perform the same functions as the OS500 station. The system is windows based and fully open and scalable and does not need an RTA board to communicate with the MB300 network and its implementation cost would be less expensive than the 800xA system.

Please contact me if you are interested in more information, sal_banos [at] yahoo [.] com
 
Top