Wonderware/Web Information Server vs. Ignition Server

After many false starts, networking problems, crashes and calls into Wonderware......our Web Information Server is up and running. Its not exactly getting rave reviews. It doesnt support our plant SCADA graphics and can only really display summary screens and trending. And Its really slow.

We plan on buying 4-5 new licenses in the next year or so at $1,200 a piece. In my opinion its throwing good money after bad. I have "heard" that you can set up an Ignition server that can pull data right off a Wonderware Enterprise historian, make up some screens and run as many terminal service client connections as you like.

Anyone ever seen or done this?

I have set up an Ignition server on Linux. It was absolutely painless to set up and from my limited experience I was very pleased with the functionality.

You don't need to use Terminal Services with Ignition HMI. Each client runs the HMI in Java, which allows you to run it on lots of platforms.

They also have a web-based HMI for devices which can't run Java, but from my discussions last year with their tech support, the web-based interface is quite a resource hog on the server.

I'm not sure about connecting to Wonderware/InTouch Historian. They have support for lots of protocols, and also some third-party modules to extend functionality further.

Their sales team was very knowledgeable and willing to help. I would recommend giving them a quick call or email to ensure Ignition can talk to Historian properly and achieve what you're trying to do.

Plus, you can download the fully functional demo and try it out free. From there, you can ensure it works before paying a dime. (Take that, InTouch!)

I'm definitely an Ignition fanboy at this point... Would like to hear more about your experience with it.

Saturn_Europa said:

After many false starts, networking problems, crashes and calls into Wonderware......our Web Information Server is up and running. Its not exactly getting rave reviews. It doesnt support our plant SCADA graphics and can only really display summary screens and trending. And Its really slow.

We plan on buying 4-5 new licenses in the next year or so at $1,200 a piece. In my opinion its throwing good money after bad. I have "heard" that you can set up an Ignition server that can pull data right off a Wonderware Enterprise historian, make up some screens and run as many terminal service client connections as you like.

Anyone ever seen or done this?

Click to expand...

Saturn_Europa said:

After many false starts, networking problems, crashes and calls into Wonderware......our Web Information Server is up and running. Its not exactly getting rave reviews. It doesnt support our plant SCADA graphics and can only really display summary screens and trending. And Its really slow.

We plan on buying 4-5 new licenses in the next year or so at $1,200 a piece. In my opinion its throwing good money after bad. I have "heard" that you can set up an Ignition server that can pull data right off a Wonderware Enterprise historian, make up some screens and run as many terminal service client connections as you like.

Anyone ever seen or done this?

Click to expand...

Im not familiar with wonderware historian but a quick search shows it is stored in sql server. as long as you can query data out it shouldnt be a problem outside of being able to use some of the shortcuts that you would have using the ignition historian.

I believe you can query the WW historian with SQL calls, you just can't dig into the historian databases directly. IIRC in the WW Historian manual it talks about doing this.

With that said, drop WW like a bad habit and use Ignition if you can. Unfortunately I don't have a WW Historian DB running to try this out. Give IA a call directly or ask on their support forums.

Saturn_Europa said:

After many false starts, networking problems, crashes and calls into Wonderware......our Web Information Server is up and running. Its not exactly getting rave reviews. It doesnt support our plant SCADA graphics and can only really display summary screens and trending. And Its really slow.

We plan on buying 4-5 new licenses in the next year or so at $1,200 a piece. In my opinion its throwing good money after bad. I have "heard" that you can set up an Ignition server that can pull data right off a Wonderware Enterprise historian, make up some screens and run as many terminal service client connections as you like.

Anyone ever seen or done this?

Click to expand...

Ignition can connect to any standard SQL database as long as you have the logon credentials, user - password.

Yes this is possible. Last place I worked they used SQL Reporting Services to produce daily production and quality reports.

The WW historian doesn't give you direct access to its database but presents a wrapper which makes it appear like a standard SQL database.

Do a search for Wonderware Historian Concepts, there's a lot of info in that document.

Thank you everyone for the comments! I'm going to dig into it more tomorrow.

Well you will hear a lot of input from Rockwell and Wonderware fans about the faults of Ignition, and that is "Our system is better because it has lineage and legacy, blah, blah". After the WinXP>Win7>Skip Win8>no WIN9>try WIN10 fiasco, we took the plunge into Ignition on a Linux CPU, no regrets. This is not a personal choice, this is a balance of cost and performance, once the engineers removed their personal attachment regarding the proprietary SCADA platforms things worked out well. It boils down bang for the $ and performance, Ignition won on our site.

You can parse the "View tables" without issue, but everything is ODBC and very slow. Also large topics on TopServer to add 10%-15% PLC overhead with large analog calls.

Our WW uses a VB.net import package and stored procedures to create reports, the shiny web dashboards WW touted are an extra expense, as is the excel add-on package. $$$$$$$$$$$

Only problem is bringing the engineers on board, once the talk with RA and WW sales about changing, they are invited to lunch and let the horror stories begin.

Downsides to Ignition?

I've been doing RA and WW for years and other than seeing a few ads for Ignition never really paid it much attention. I just did the demo and feel like I've missed a real opportunity here. I've yet to find any down side to Ignition. The thing that really has me is the Linux support. I have old PCs running WW on XP and have started virtualizing in order to support the old version on new hardware due to the excessive cost to upgrade the software. Being able to run everything under Linux would have made my life so much easier.

Anyone ever run Ignition on a large scale? What about centralized vs. de-centralized? If I lose connectivity to the server do my local HMIs fail? Or can I run a local server without paying for a whole separate installation? Wonderware pricing is horrible, but cheaper at the entry level. Ignition would be cheaper for larger scale deployments, but I don't want to be worried I can't run the machine because of loss of remote connectivity to the server. Any feedback or thoughts are appreciated.

habadeer said:

Anyone ever run Ignition on a large scale? What about centralized vs. de-centralized? If I lose connectivity to the server do my local HMIs fail? Or can I run a local server without paying for a whole separate installation? Wonderware pricing is horrible, but cheaper at the entry level. Ignition would be cheaper for larger scale deployments, but I don't want to be worried I can't run the machine because of loss of remote connectivity to the server. Any feedback or thoughts are appreciated.

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Plenty of places are running Ignition on a large scale, hundreds of clients and hundreds of thousands of tags. There have been growing pains along the way as in 2010 when Ignition was introduced targets were something like 20 clients and ~ 100,00 tags.

To IA's credit they have constantly improved and introduced ways to scale higher than their original target, so large scale considerations shouldn't scare you away. But it requires architecture planning, you aren't running 1 gateway to handle 200 clients and 1 million tags. But the modular construction allows you to create Ignition Gateway servers across multiple VMs to do specific tasks such as host Vision clients, host the IO servers, host the historian function...etc. In this instance you only license the gateways for what features you need to run on that gateway. You don't put the Ignition "Pro" package across everything.

You will lose local client functionality if the primary gateway is lost for some reason, however you have local client "fall back" options to combat this. Additional licensing applies as you would need IO drivers at the local client, and a 1 client Vision license to run without the primary server to talk with the PLC. Again, some architecture design considerations to be made to understand what you actually need. Custom licensing for your application is always an option so you only pay for what you need.

What are you trying to achieve exactly?

We've done a few projects now using MS SQL Reports to pull data out of WW Historian and it works well for publishing both on-demand and automated reports.

If you just want to make some simple dashboards and you have WW Historian 2014 R2 SP1 or higher then you can use Historian InSight which is included for free (just uses existing Historian client licenses), which is a web based easy to use Historian client that supports building dashboards.

habadeer said:

I've been doing RA and WW for years and other than seeing a few ads for Ignition never really paid it much attention. I just did the demo and feel like I've missed a real opportunity here. I've yet to find any down side to Ignition. The thing that really has me is the Linux support. I have old PCs running WW on XP and have started virtualizing in order to support the old version on new hardware due to the excessive cost to upgrade the software. Being able to run everything under Linux would have made my life so much easier.

Anyone ever run Ignition on a large scale? What about centralized vs. de-centralized? If I lose connectivity to the server do my local HMIs fail? Or can I run a local server without paying for a whole separate installation? Wonderware pricing is horrible, but cheaper at the entry level. Ignition would be cheaper for larger scale deployments, but I don't want to be worried I can't run the machine because of loss of remote connectivity to the server. Any feedback or thoughts are appreciated.

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I would say half our clients run Linux, have run Windows. Being able to deploy the same package on everything from a Raspberry Pi to a big infrastructure server is a plus.

As for client size, we have worked on everything from small Mom and Pop's companies all the way up to internationally distributed systems for both Fortune 100 and Government projects. We dove into Ignition head first when it first came out and haven't supported much since.