OSI Monarch first impressions (was: Re: Control Network seperation from Business Network)
joeblow
electric generation last week. I am not affiliated with OSI in any way.
This appears to be a core system that does the RTU polling, data
transfers, and core SCADA functions. It also has a standard functionality
MMI. The competitive advantage of this system lies in making extensive
APIs available for whatever satellite apps and processing the customer
wants, including extracting data and inserting data into the core
databases. Most of the demos of this functionality was done via ODBC and
MS Access and Excel, although perl was also discussed.
First impressions are that it is a simplistic system. This is not to say
primitive or minimalist.
I get the impression that this is meant to be a functional system out of
the box, but the intention is to provide enough so that it can be
tailored to match the customer's specific business processes. In fact,
with the core SCADA functionality provided, you could pretty much write
your own system around it based on using the APIs
Screens looked about as easy to change and maintain as a typical MSWindows app.
Which brings up one of the major issues I had with the system: the system
was touted as being platform independent. The sales guy specifically said
that a major SE USA utility had selected and installed this system because
they wanted end-to-end linux, and OSI was the only bidder that could
fulfill that requirement.
In fact, the OSI system is -not- truly end-to-end platform independent,
although that did not really become clear until well into the afternoon
of the first day. The servers (what they call DACs) can be platform
independent, but any consoles or development or maintenance machines must
be a wintel 2000 based box (win2000, winxp, etc). (It is,
however, mentioned in the fine print on the web site). While
technologically not a show-stopper, it does bring up the question, if they
misrepresent this, what else is being misrepresented?
The underlying databases are proprietary, and look to be fairly simplistic
binary b-trees (just a guess from a quick look at some docs). Database
integrity checking and correction seems to be simplistic. Audit trails
are non-existent, although they are coming in the next release.
The API's look to be extensive, and in fact had us all drooling.
The overall impression of the system at the end of the demo is positive
with reservations. The most heard comment was 'looks great! what
are the downsides...there have to be some.'
Hope this helps.
Walter Driedger
Simplistic means dumbed down. "If the government printed more money we'd
all be rich," is a simplistic view of economics.
Walter.
"joeblow" <dad...@casselout.dk> wrote in message
news:pan.2004.05.25...@casselout.dk...