OSIsoft recently announced the release of a High Availability (HA) PI System, an update to the company’s enterprise class real-time historian platform. It claims that this unified release meets the demands of organizations that depend on the availability of operational data and introduces a boost in protecting data by providing fault tolerant software that delivers interface failover, buffering and PI Server replication.

"Depending on the style of manufacturing, real-time event definition and monitoring may be critical to your composite application. While a failed business transaction can usually be detected and corrected at a later point, long-term damage to assets, brand, and loss of life can result if critical manufacturing events aren’t sensed and responded to in a timely manner," said Alison Smith, in the October 2006 AMR research article ‘SOA on Steroids: The Reality of Manufacturing Composite Applications.’

"It’s no coincidence that data historians have re-emerged as a critical foundational element of emerging manufacturing SOAs. This new generation of data historians, do much more than aggregate, compress, archive, and trend real-time data. Today they are huge (and sometimes distributed) state detection machines, designed for complex definition and real-time evaluation of complex events."

Even in a simple configuration, there are unavoidable conditions that can trigger data loss or render data inaccessible. While the PI System can prevent data loss during planned maintenance, lack of access to data during a maintenance period may be unacceptable for the end user who depends on timely access to that data.

Within the release, primary technical advances include PI Server replication, interfaces that will write time-series data directly to members of the collective, buffering data temporarily for those unable to receive it for a period of time, fail-over, so that if the primary interface node fails to deliver data to the PI Servers, it will fail-over to the secondary PI interface to run in "hot" standby mode.

The PI System is fundamental to the operational strategy of global leaders in manufacturing, energy, utilities and other process industries where access and visibility into mission critical data is paramount to the success of many initiatives.

Existing OSIsoft customers can upgrade from PI to PI HA using point-and-click tools that leverage existing operational investments and infrastructure.