Small resource and manufacturing sites face many of the same challenges faced by larger-scale operations, and therefore require many of the same things - just smaller. One of these items is a simple, fit-for-purpose historian.
Historian price points are typically expensive compared to BabelFish. BabelFish Capture is a low-cost historian that sources data from process measurement and control equipment, and stores this data along with their change histories. The “historised” data collected by BabelFish Capture can then be used by BabelFish for display and trending. Using BabelFish Capture as an historian with BabelFish means that third party historian support is not required, reducing the total system support and maintenance burden.
BabelFish Capture is an affordable, easy to install, and easy to use, historian database. While larger, enterprise process historians are designed to manage the storage needs of the large corporation, BabelFish Capture focuses on data collection, and serves up the data to the processing and visualisation might of BabelFish.
Key Features
BabelFish Capture is a lightweight historian that compresses and stores time-series data from process-connected data sources (SCADA systems, PLCs, etc) via standard BabelFish Adaptors. BabelFish Capture serves decompressed data to higher-level systems via the standard BabelFish Adaptor interface.
- Officially supports 6000 tags each at a scan rate of 60 seconds
- Can be deployed stand-alone or as part of an existing BabelFish installation
- Uses the existing set of ISS Adaptors to acquire time series data from lower level systems, such as OPC
- Set of internal statistics tags that allow you to historise performance metrics of the Capture System
The default configuration for the system is to poll on a periodic basis for data values for a collection of tags. The system will also handle the ability to capture ‘data change’ events from the source control systems; such as OPC.
Benefits of BabelFish Capture include:
- Rapid storage and retrieval of time-series data.
- Able to start and run autonomously and independently of BabelFish.
- Mechanisms to assist onsite supportability, including support for the standard ISS logger and inbuilt status and performance tags.
- Permit online ‘hot’ backup of the system such that an up to the minute backup can be performed.
- Ability to export and import data from flat files. The export process is able to export the changed tags from the system so that these changes can be propagated through to a different environment such as Test to Production.
BabelFish Capture's collector architecture allows data to be gathered from disparate control systems and even other data sources - including other historians - into a single, centralised database for long-term storage.
BabelFish Capture is implemented as a Windows service and follows .NET standards.
The BabelFish Capture Adaptor is the interface that enables the BabelFish portal to query the Capture historian for data. It is installed on the same machine as the main BabelFish system.
The BabelFish Capture historian is a Windows service that polls third party systems for data, stores the data in its own proprietary database, and serves the data to BabelFish via the configured Adaptor. It can be installed on the same machine as the main BabelFish server, or a different machine if overall system load or company policy requires it.