Power Operation Server component

The Power Operation Server is the required base component of any Power Operation system responsible for data acquisition, alarming and trending of historical data. The Server includes:

  • Power Operation engineering tool suite.
  • Open data exchange protocols/tools (OPC UA client/server, OPC DA client/server, OPC AE server, EcoStruxure Web Services (EWS) for interoperability w/ EBO, CtAPI). Open data exchange protocols are the only mechanisms Power Operation has to serve data to other clients, whereas it cannot with device driver protocols.
    • Each Server supports up to 10 concurrent OPC, 10 concurrent OLED8, and 10 concurrent CtAPI connections.
  • Device drivers (Modbus primary, ION, IEC 61850 primary, IEC 60870-5-104 primary, BACnet/IP primary, DNP3 primary, SNMP v.2, etc.)
  • Basic reporting (Multi-Device Usage Reports, Rapid Access Labels, Single Device Usage Reports, Tabular Reports, Tabular Report Exports, Trend Reports)

Licensing options

Licensed by number of points or tags (options include: 500, 1500, 5000, 15000 and Unlimited tags). For more information on licensing, see License keys.

Design considerations

Server redundancy is achieved by licensing additional Servers in the design.

How points are calculated

EcoStruxure™ Power Operation counts all I/O device addresses dynamically at runtime. This includes all tags used by alarms, trends, reports, events, pages, in Super Genies, use of the TagRead() and TagWrite() Cicode functions, or read or written to using DDE, ODBC, or the CTAPI. A variable tag is only counted towards your point count the first time it is requested. That is, even though you may have configured a certain tag on a page in your project, unless you navigate to that page and request the data, the variable tag will not be counted towards your point count.

In addition to this, the following changes were made to the licensing structure in Power Operation:

  • I/O point count is now tag based not address based. For example, two tags that use the same PLC address will be counted twice. If two trend tags use the same variable tag, it will be counted once. The same applies to alarms.
  • For the multi-process mode, each server component will accumulate its own point count. The server component point count is the count added up from all server components. If two server components use the same tags, say alarm and trend, the tags will be counted twice when the point count gets summed.
  • For the multi-process mode, the client component will also accumulate its own point count including super genie and CTAPI tags.
  • For the multi-process mode, the machine point count will be the point count on the client component or the point count added up from all server components, whichever is bigger. For example, if the total point count for all server components is 100, and the client component point count including CTAPI and super genies is 95, the kernel "General" window will show 100. If the client component point count reaches 120 later and the server component point count remains 100, the kernel "General" window will show 120.
  • Reading properties of a tag with TagGetProperty() will cause that tag to be included in the point count, even if the value is not read.
  • Writing to local variables or disk I/O variable tags via OPC etc will also increase the point count. For example, if you use an OPC client to write to a local variable, each local variable will be counted once, the first time it is used.