It's exciting to discuss the virtues of collecting and storing years of process data with engineers and operators. We often hear the ideas that are exchanged about what could be done and how the process could operate more efficiently if data was available to key individuals. It has struck me recently how many times these data historian discussions seem limited by the fear of budget and deployment time. Generally, by the end of a preliminary discussion, someone at the table sighs and makes a statement like, "It would be nice, but I'm sure the investment would be too much to consider".
Have you had a similar experience? Have you asked yourself, "Why does it cost so much to store data?". Good news, not all data historians are expensive. In fact, Canary is continually working to lower it's costs for storing decades of data.
There are two ways that a data historian company can help reduce project costs.
- Lower Software Licensing Costs
- Decrease Deployment Time and Resources
Canary is working hard every day to do both.
To address capital expenditures, Canary has continued to disrupt the market by lowering it's pricing. As an example, small systems are $4,000 and an unlimited tag server is $64,000.
In addition to lowering pricing, Canary has also deployed subscription models for on premise or cloud hosted solutions. Again, for as little as $35 per month, customers can begin storing process data.
Additional cost mitigation can be found in the form of annual support and maintenance contracts. While these contracts offer great value by keeping customers up-to-date on all versions and provide training and support as needed, they can often become way too expensive. Canary has hard-lined this figure at an annual renewal of 15% of licensed software.
The Canary Data Historian was engineered to be simple to install and manage. This greatly reduced deployment time and can lead to serious cost savings. Unless your system is very large, generally more than 20,000 tags, you will be able self deploy Canary and generally accomplish this in less than a day. Canary staff are always available to help as are our Certified System Integrator partners.
If you are currently researching data historians, there are a few things we want you to know:
- Not all data historians are the same, the way in which the data is stored will greatly impact the overall system performance and management requirements
- SQL databases are common but often problematic. Companies like Canary and OSIsoft Pi learned long ago that the best solution for time-series data storage is in a non-SQL database
- Trending tools that are easy to use are faster to deploy and get used by more staff more often
- Simple to use is not simple to engineer. We have spent years making our tools as powerful as possible with easy to understand interfaces
For a free demo of a Canary system, just ask! We would love to show you more in a 30-minute walk through.
