Today's Automation News Headlines from Automation.com

November 30, 2011 - GE Intelligent Platforms announced Proficy Historian 4.5. This Enterprise Historian solution collects, aggregates and organizes the massive amount of data that exists across organizations enabling effective decision-making and tight governance. It is easily integrated into any company’s enterprise systems portfolio through an open, flexible architecture that easily leverages existing investments.

Proficy Historian 4.5 adds support of more than 15 million tags. This feature allows users to aggregate and disseminate information across the enterprise through a secure and scalable Historian platform.

At GE Energy’s Monitoring & Diagnostics (M&D) Center in Atlanta, where they use Proficy to monitor more than 1,000 gas turbine assets across the globe, they wanted to be sure their architecture and hardware/software technologies would scale to meet both their business growth projections but also accommodate exponential increase in data. The team commissioned GE’s Global Research Center to conduct an analysis of Big Data technologies on massive time-series process data which are at the heart of GE Energy’s M&D applications.

In the study, conducted by the GE Global Research Center in August 2011, Proficy Historian was shown to excel against relational and unstructured databases for time series data. Typical columnar or relational databases are not well suited for handling time series process data queries at this scale and some of the newer technologies are too immature at this point for real production/operations environments, according to the study.
 

“Proficy Historian 4.5 empowers enterprises to deliver on business objectives today and in the future,” said Brian Courtney, General Manager Operations Data Management for GE Intelligent Platforms. “This platform is the enabling pillar for companies to realize value for other corporate initiatives such as Operational Excellence.”

“GE is getting ahead of the issue, taking a leading position on Big Data as so many of our businesses generate and depend on effective management of data across the enterprise,” said Bill Ruh, GE Vice President and leader of the company’s software inititiaves. “The massive growth in data generated by operations is fueling the need to retain more and more data for analysis and compliance. Open architectures and interoperability across business systems is necessary to accelerate and provide complete context for business decisions.”

“For process data, Proficy Historian is a complete solution for massive data management systems,” said Courtney. “The Historian used in the study was our out-of-the-box, standard Proficy Historian, an easy-to-use and fast-to-implement solution. We didn’t need to do any custom programming to achieve these results. The study validated our belief that this new release of Historian can solve Big Data customer problems today, without requiring extensive infrastructure changes or customization.”