Canary Blog

Monitoring Multiple Locations Through Corporate Mirroring

Written by Jeff Knepper | Jan 17, 2017 1:22:00 PM

Canary Software was designed for full enterprise solutions. The historian can scale to handle 25 million tags, hunderds of sites and remote logging locations, as well as be installed with redundancy that ensures data integrity as well as security. The system is highly customizable, allowing each application to be designed for the specific customer's needs.

Redundancy and Communication Outages

The Canary Historian receives data through the Canary Logger and Store and Forward Service. Store and Forward is comprised of two components, a Sender Service and a Receiver Service. These two services communicate using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and all data is encrypted during communication.

The OPC server, Canary Logger, and Store and Forward Service can be installed on the same machine as the Canary Enterprise Historian or sit on their own independent machine and connect to several historians across multiple networks. If contact is lost between the Sender and Receiver Service, the Sender Service will cache data to local disk. When communications return, the cached data is transferred to the historian in time sequence order and removed from the Sender Service.

Not only can one Sender Service connect to more than one historian, but multiple logging machines can also be configured and networked to one historian. These loggers can be setup across multiple networks to monitor remote sites as well. The Canary system does not limit the number of loggers used, and there is no additional charge for adding extra loggers as needed.

 

Data Mirroring

The Canary Enterprise Historian provides the mirroring of stored data on multiple site historians to provide high levels of data redundancy as well as to simplify data retrieval. The Mirror Service allows for both live data as well as daily batch uploads, and can be configured based on the DataSet the data is housed in.

A Corporate Enterprise Historian is not limited to pulling data through only the Canary Mirror Service. Since each individual Store and Forward Service can point to multiple historians, local site loggers can be configured to push data to both the local site historians as well as the corporate historian. This model allows for both site and corporate locations to receive real-time data as well as increases communication and database redundancy.


With appropriate security privileges, data reads can be made across any of the connected historians, site or corporate. Using Microsoft Windows security infrastructure, users can be given access to multiple data sets and tag values across multiple sites while still being restricted to other historians or tag groups.

 

System Capacity and Performance

When outlining capacity and performance at the Enterprise level it is important to distinguish between two different historian roles, site and corporate.
At the site or local level, an individual historian can log up to 1,000,000 tags. This is accomplished through a minimum of fifteen individual logging sessions, each communicating to the local historian through Canary’s Store and Forward Service.

At the historian or corporate level, a single Mirror Historian can support 25,000,000 tags. The Mirror Historian is updated daily from all local site historians. If live data is required, the Mirror Historian can be configured to handle specific live data feeds, determined by DataSet, as well as still receive daily file updates. The live data can be pushed directly from the logging session at the local site, or can also be sent from the site historian. The flexibility of the Canary system allows each application to be customized for the specific needs of the client and their individual needs and limitations such as bandwidth, budget, and data needs.