July 15, 2019 - Plant and factory managers may find themselves able to protect more of their production assets from security incidents and lifecycle risks using the FactoryTalk AssetCentre software . The latest version of the software from Rockwell Automation expands its asset-management and recovery capabilities to support several new types of assets.
Disaster-recovery support is now available for FactoryTalk View Site Edition HMI applications and Stratix managed Ethernet switches.
Users can back up the current state of their custom HMI applications to avoid rebuilding them in the event of a system failure or disaster, minimizing downtime in the production system. They can also back up the configurations of their Stratix 5400, 5700 and 8000 switches. This can help them avoid the process of reconfiguring managed switches following an incident.
Disaster recovery support is also now available for third-party software. The FactoryTalk AssetCentre software’s custom-device plug-in capability can be used to automate third-party device-configuration software to do disaster recovery and backup and compare, when supported by the software.
Lifecycle status information is now accessible for Allen-Bradley I/O modules that are used with PLC, SLC 5000, MicroLogix, CompactLogix and ControlLogix controllers. This information can help users stay on top of where their assets are in their lifecycles, so they can track risks like obsolescence and better plan their modernization strategies.
In addition to supporting more assets, the new version of the FactoryTalk AssetCentre software now supports larger systems. The software can also better protect communications between a user’s assets by using secure communications with FactoryTalk Linx and IPSec adoption.