Introduction To OPC
OPC is a set of standards that allow data to be shared between various different hardware and software. There are various published specifications, but the original specification and the one that we provide support for is the Data Access Specification. Available on the OPC Foundation website is a detailed explanation of the set of specifications. As OPC has become more prevalent, other specifications have evolved requiring that OPC become a more general term describing the set of specifications rather than the original data access specification. We provide OPC server and OPC client solutions globally to integrators, manufacturers, and end-users. Our solutions primarily involve supporting the OPC data access specification in conjunction with data acquisition using our PowerPAC-OPC product, and vibration monitoring using our PlantIQ-OPC product. A significant benefit of employing OPC server and client solutions is that the hundreds or thousands of temperature measurements, pressures, overall, static and dynamic data can be measured and viewed at multiple locations throughout the site with software from many vendors.
Servers And Clients
Any OPC solution can be viewed from two perspectives; the OPC server and the OPC client. The OPC server is generally responsible for making available acquired data, and the OPC client is generally responsible for retrieving this data from the OPC server(s) and passing it along to a software package. Though in some cases the OPC client will send data to the OPC server in a reversing of the roles. Our OPC servers and OPC clients have the capability to work in either or both of these modes resulting in the maximum flexibility and eliminating the need for a second set of OPC servers and OPC clients to handle the reverse flow of data. In addition, our OPC server and OPC client framework has been designed to be extremely efficient thus allowing a high bandwidth of data to be transmitted without adversely affecting the operation of the computer. Many of our existing systems have OPC servers publishing hundreds of points, with multiple OPC clients subscribing to hundreds of points from one or more OPC servers.
