Re: [foxboro] Upgrading Foxboro AW from P91, (Dell 2800), to P91, (Dell 2900), 2003 Server

  • From: "Doucet, Terrence" <tdoucet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:07:59 -0500

Corey,

If you recall, IA started out with AP10 and AP20 - Foxboro built host
stations. Nicely under the control of Foxboro but sadly, about 3 years
out of date at the time of release.  The kids with their games are
driving the micro-processor industry to faster and more powerful
processors. The automation vendors cannot keep pace if they take the
time to design their own (FT or redundant) processors. The blazing speed
of the latest DELL server still requires substantial engineering effort
to make it into an AW.

I don't think any automation supplier will ever decouple themselves (AW
type machine) from hardware again.

Terry Doucet, Eng.

*****************************************************

I can't imagine that those "restore anywhere" claims hold up in any but 
the simplest of situations.  Windows is so finicky about hardware that
if 
you put in a box that's different in any significant way, you are 
seemingly likely to have problems.

In light of that, I wonder if Foxboro or any other DCS vendor has
thought 
about ways to minimize the pain they (and their customers) endure at the

hands of COTS computer vendors and Microsoft (I'll leave the "ditch 
Windows" argument alone for the moment).  Maybe run on a bare-metal 
virtualization layer, a la VMware ESX.  Or decouple themselves from the 
hardware, a la PLC vendors.


They can still test on certain PC configurations, and only support
those, 
but there have to be some gains in doing something along these lines.
For 
our Allen-Bradley setup, we can take a newly-installed Windows box, 
install the A-B apps, copy over a few config files, and we're good to
go. 
No commits, no special ethernet drivers, no piles of registry edits.  As

long as you meet some basic hardware specs there is a very good chance
it 
will work.


Corey
 
 
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