Inductive Automation Aims to Help Industry Overcome OT Isolationism

The new deployment infrastructure in 8.3 includes containerization, orchestration, and source control features. These features work most effectively “when the platform has native support for them,” Clegg says. “And with 8.3, we have the most IT-friendly SCADA system yet, with all configurations managed in JSON text-based files for source control compliance.”

There is no walled garden

Noting that “walled gardens are not the answer for the future of industrial automation software,” Clegg explained that Ignition’s new public historian API and Power Historian, added in Ignition 8.3, will allow users to “leverage time series data at enterprise scale from the edge to the cloud.”

Companies can use IT tools to store industrial data using SQL databases for Ignition’s historian. Clegg said it’s about using open data with industry-standard tools that “your company is already familiar with,” and noted that Inductive Automation’s history of using SQL databases has led some people to ask when the company will build a “real historian.”

Clegg said the company is not following the traditional industrial historian path and is sticking with SQL because of the huge degree of innovation taking place in consumer IT to deal with the massive influx of time-series data. “We want to leverage the IT systems at Ignition,” he said, “and the new general historian API (application programming interface) allows metadata to be stored for advanced queries. So, it’s not just a historian, it’s a platform for building historians.”

Preliminary benchmarks of Ignition’s new Power Historian’s data collection speed show that it has the capacity to collect data at well over twice the speed of SQLite and mySQL.