General feelings on WonderWare

Hello all, I'm just wondering if anyone out there is running the latest WonderWare ArchestrA IDE 3.0 and Intouch 10 and can give me a general consensous as to how its preforming.

The reason I ask is that we have this software installed on a clients site for a recent job and it seems like the support calls have been never ending... it's as if every time someone sneezes near an Intouch node the screen locks up and every time it gets cloudy the ArchestrA server needs to be redeployed.

Is anyone out there having better luck with this software? We are up to date with patch 3 on both so far. I am particuarly worried as the client using the software now is relatively small but we have a couple of extremely large installs coming up over the next year and if we see these kind of problems on those projects we will be in a HUGE world of hurt....

I have a reasonably large A2 installation using IDE V3 but INTouch v9.0 not 10 but I can comment on the performance of what I have.

I am running 4 IDE nodes which are HP G5 servers (two primary/two backup) with 8gb of memory, twin dual core Xeon CPU's and a raid disk array with 500Gb storage.

Generally as I have been making the system steadily larger over the last year or so I have seen every issue you mention and the key to it all is if you leave it alone it is fine but as soon as you start re-configuring the system for any reason (deploying new stuff etc) it falls over.

I have found as above that the more CPU power on the IDE nodes the better, (it does not seem to be large consumer of RAM) for large installations and make sure plenty of small engines are used instead of 1 big one. I actually trended the CPU usage over a week and found after a redeployment the CPU rises on average 10% and takes 5 days to sort it's self out which I cannot explain...

My general feeling is that if it is a system to be installed and run for 5 years without touching it then it should be fine if you have enough CPU power from the begining.

A small side note I am running a whole suite of WW products as below -

A2
IDE 250,000 point licence (I think)
DTA 100,000 point licence
INSql
Active Factory
PEM (Production Event Module)
I am also investigating installing Facteligence

I have a hard time with the fact that this is acceptable or normal - particularly with the immense resources you've thrown at it (both hardware and software).

I'm curious what people's experiences with other vendors similarly sized systems has been...

We have numerous systems at our company.

Some DeltaV, some Rockwell RSViewSE, some Wonderware.

Some of our systems are robust and bullet proof, while some are shoddy at best.

So, why are some good and some bad? My answer is the talent of those that designed the systems. Out of all the automation staff at our company, we have determined that only 5% have the talent and vision to create applications, while 40% have the talent to make changes, and the others only have the talent to manage change.

We are embarking on upgrading one of the larger Wonderware systems to IDE 3.0 with Intouch 10.0. Since this is new to us, we are leveraging Wonderware and another top tier integrator to assist us with the knowledge of designing the system. Our goal is to make it bullet proof. More to come as we progress.