May 1st is a festive day where you sing the praises of your favorite RSS feed reader and send gifts of
highly interesting RSS feeds to all your family, friends and co-workers. (OK maybe that’s just how I’m going to spend the day.) Actually RSS Awareness Day has been started by a group of people trying to… er… raise awareness about RSS. It may not be as much fun as say ‘ Talk Like A Pirate Day’, but I still think it’s important.

The numbers on how many folks out there currently using RSS feeds vary , but most cite reports such as this one published by Yahoo in 2005. Everyone agrees that the number is much lower that it should be, and the underlying cause is simple awareness. To quote from the Yahoo paper “The real story, however, is the much larger population of “Unaware RSS users” who consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN). 27% of online users consume third-party content on these pages without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.”

It works, it’s Really Simple (hence the name) and it saves countless hours of web searching. Not to mention being able to get rid of e-mail alerts. I for one have enough messages to wade through without signing up for more. So why aren’t more people using RSS? Plenty of bloggers talk about it, even those in the relatively small world of industrial automation blogs. I know Jim Cahill , Gary Mintchell and others both tout the benefits of RSS. Personally I think that people are continually overwhelmed by new technology and don’t have the time (or at least don’t think they have the time) to learn about it and get around to using it. At some levels OPC faces the same challenges. Many times I’ve heard statements like, ‘Yeah we’ve heard of OPC but just haven’t got the opportunity to really explore how it could help us”. Yet probably a good number of these same folks are using OPC somewhere in their industrial applications and aren’t aware of it.

Who of you out there are using RSS? If so, how? Simply as a web/news aggregator or are there those using RSS as a feature in some Industrial Automation application?

This is not going to be a regular thing (a la Digital Bond’s weekly recap). It’s just been a busy week so I’m going to highlight a bunch of short topics.

1. Microsoft has released Windows XP SP3 to manufacturing.  It’s available to OEMs and enterprise customers on April 29^th and is scheduled to hit Automatic Updates sometime this summer.  Here is a summary of what it covers.   No word yet on what (if any) effect this latest service pack will have on OPC installations.   The folks at MatrikonOPC support tell me they are scrounging up a copy for their testing, and will let me know the results.  Stay tuned.
2. In a related story Dell will be offering Windows XP on new machines after the June 30^th deadline.  (Does anyone have Vista running on their plant floor yet?)
3. Updated OPC UA SDK Documentation is now available which includes; the PowerPoint presentations on Implementation from the last DevCon, generated help documentation from code comments, a WIP architecture document and some Viso diagrams.  These will be of help to all those people out there working on OPC UA products.
4. ConnectivityWeek 2008 – “Empowering The Energy Revolution” is happening next month, and includes the two-day IndConn, which focuses on industrial IT and automation.   This is organized in partnership with the OPC Foundation and Open O&M.   There is an impressive list of speakers and many of the IndConn topics will touch on OPC UA.
5. Last weekend was 20+ Celsius, all the snow was gone from my yard and we enjoyed a BBQ in the sun.  This week it snowed for three days straight, and we got over 30 cm of snow.  It has nothing to do with OPC, but I’m still not over it.  There must be someway to control the weather with OPC.  Maybe with a BACnet server?

My last post on Green IT spurred some off-line conversations with folks.  Once you get talking about OPC and Green IT, being able to access the IT assets in a standardized way is really only half the story.   Real savings come from also being able to access and control the building management systems.  The concept of integration is expanding to encompass the management of energy demand in the building, energy supply to it, and control of the entire process.  By knowing how the heat generation of the machines affects the building temperature lets higher level applications optimize the cooling equipment.  The key requirement is access to data from the energy management system and control of equipment.  OPC has that covered too with OPC Servers available for a wide variety of building management protocols like Modbus, BACNet, LonWorks, Johnson Controls and others.

One of the problems people face when trying to create an Energy Management and Control System (EMCS) is integrating building systems into the network.  The Building Management Systems (BMS) have all the tools and applications for dealing with building networks.  IT has access to very powerful Network Management Systems (NMS) and SNMP connectivity to the various network assets.   OPC is an obvious way to bridge the gap.

Industries in the Automation world such as refining, chemical processing, manufacturing, utilities, etc already know the value of energy optimization in their process, particularly when dealing with heating and cooling systems.  They already use higher level optimization applications, calculation packages or analysis tools to take monitored data and take the appropriate actions in the control system.   Using OPC, the BMS and IT applications can easily leverage similar systems.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone out there with EMCS systems.  Do you make use of OPC today?  Are your BMS and/or IT systems part of the equation?  Why or Why not?

Going Green is always a popular subject these days.   One my RSS feeds to the Green Blog pointed me to this ComputerWorld article on ‘green data centers’.  As the opening paragraph nicely sums up “Rising energy costs and the need to consolidate IT infrastructure will force business managers to re-evaluate data retention policies and learn how much power every device in their data center consumes.”  According to a quote from the piece, getting that data is a big job.

“Mark O’Gara, vice president of infrastructure management at Highmark Inc., said the health care provider is already tweaking optimization across its two-year-old green data center and 28,000-square-foot raised-floor space used for IT. After the new data center was built, O’Gara said his next major task was to measure energy consumption for every piece of IT architecture in the facility.”

It got me thinking, would it really be that big a job using OPC?  You could use the OPC Server for Windows Performance Monitor to capture the ‘Power Consumption’ parameter on any machine running a Microsoft OS.  For all the other IT network pieces you would use the OPC Server for SNMP, since many of those devices provide a ‘Power Consumption’ OID.  Once you have OPC access to the data points, it’s just a matter of archiving the data for analysis.

Going ‘Green’ is much more than a buzz word or a stand on social responsibility.  For companies and data centers that are running thousands of IT assets it is becoming more and more important to figure out how much energy each device consumes and to find ways of cutting down on energy usage.  Industry advancements in server processor power management present an attractive opportunity to lower average server power consumption without impacting server performance or availability. Each new Microsoft platform offers more in the way of power savings options. Administrators can take advantage of these options to lower power and cooling operating costs that are made possible by processor power management technologies.

See you really can do more with less.

It’s been a busy week at the OPC TAC meeting and Microsoft Manufacturing Operations Forum.   Progress is going well with OPC UA with several vendors (including MatrikonOPC) who will be releasing OPC UA products this year.   The focus at the Manufacturing Forum is more on how companies are using OPC today, what their pain points are with respect to integration, security and patch management.   There are many major end user companies attending who are also OPC users, such as ExxonMobil,  Cargill, Chevron, 3M and many more.

In addition to end users being able to discuss their key issues, Microsoft also showcases their next generation products.   The new products include SharePoint, PerformancePoint, Windows2008 Server, etc.   Of course with new products comes new functionality, but also new challenges for users in terms of deployment.  For example Windows 2008 server will be the last 32 bit platform.  Will all existing 32 bit applications play nicely on the 64 platforms?   2008 Server also offers a Core Server install option, which is basically a ‘mini’ install that only enables core services and applications to reduce the software footprint and increase security.  What needs to be done to get software applications running on this? So of course application support is a huge concern for end users.   Arguably the biggest challenge facing manufactures today is handling patch management and OS migration on the plant floor.  Whether it’s XP to Vista, Server 2003 to Server 2008, (or for some even NT to anything newer )

Of course OPC products fall under this umbrella too.  Deployment and support of OPC products on next generation operating systems and/or interacting with new enterprise applications is a concern for implementers.    This means that not only do end users require quality, robust, Certified OPC products from their OPC vendor, they need good, quality support.   Responsive, knowledge OPC experts,  24/7 availability and a global presence are just some of the requirements users need from their OPC support.  As the discussions show from the Manufacturing Forum, users also want assurances that their OPC products will continue to work as expected after a Microsoft security patch or other vendor software upgrade.   One way to ensure this is to work with OPC vendors who partner closely with the hardware vendors and validate their software on each new platform or generation.

What’s your experience?  How big a role does knowing you have access to good support factor in when planning product upgrades or deployment?   What risk management process do you at your facility? On line redundancy solutions for roll out?  Virtualization or other test beds?  Scheduled shut downs?