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Tunneling OPC Eliminates DCOM
Author: ICONICS
November 2007
OPC Communications has become the de facto standard for data exchange between industrial automation applications. Originally based on Microsoft’s OLE COM (Component Object Model), and DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) technologies, OPC communications quickly became widely adopted by DCS (Distributed Control System), Factory Automation, Building Control System, and other industrial automation vendors over the past ten years. It has proven to be secure, reliable, easy to use, and truly inter-operable. As a result, it has provided significant cost savings to end users, eliminating the need for them to develop expensive custom software and applications when integrating components from multiple vendors into a single system.
While the original COM/DCOM-based OPC standards have served industry well, there are limitations to its use. The most notable is the reliance on DCOM for remote communications. The most common complaints related to DCOM are the complexity to configure DCOM, that DCOM is not real-time (it can take approximately 6 minutes to detect and notify when a failed connection has occurred), and that DCOM is not firewall friendly (to pass through a firewall requires the user to open many ports on the firewall, severely compromising the security features of the firewall).
Some of the larger automation system and SCADA system vendors have worked around the limitations of DCOM based OPC communications by developing and using their own proprietary communications to move data around within their system. These systems convert the OPC data to a proprietary format at the remote (OPC Server) location. A drawback to this approach, from the user’s point of view, is that there are locked into using the particular vendor’s communications technologies. The user’s options are limited to architectures, security models, and flexibility supported by the particular vendor, and of course by the prices the vendor decides to charge.
Choosing to base their communications strategy on the core OPC standards, other SCADA vendors, including ICONICS, Inc., have adopted approaches where the OPC communications is 'tunneled' within other communications layers or technologies. This has proven to be a very effective approach that both eliminates the need for DCOM, and provides for a more open communications system, and one that continues to evolve and improve as the OPC standards continue to evolve and improve.
New with the V9 release of ICONICS DataWorX32, ICONICS is introducing a standalone OPC Tunneling product that is based on the industry proven ICONICS GenBroker communications. The DataWorX32 OPC Tunneling product advances the state-of-the-art of OPC Tunneling products in that it supports all three major OPC Standards (OPC DA, OPC AE, and OPC HDA). Furthermore, it supports new advances in OPC Tunneling security, based on the new OPC UA standards, where the user’s credentials are passed to the server side of the tunnel for authentication. More details of these features and other features of DataWorX32 OPC Tunneling are described in this paper.
Click here to visit the ICONICS site to read the full whitepaper online.
About the author:
Founded in 1986, ICONICS is an award-winning Microsoft Gold Certified Partner provider of Web-enabled, OPC-based, HMI/SCADA Visualization and Manufacturing Intelligence software for Microsoft Windows operating systems, including the new Windows Vista™. With a single development tool based on open industry standards, ICONICS products run on multiple Windows platforms including Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows XP Professional x64, Windows 2000, Pocket PC, Embedded XP, Windows 2003 Server and Windows 2003 Server x64.
A four-time nominated Microsoft Corp. Partner of the Year Finalist over the past three years, ICONICS offers "the next generation of software automation", providing the industry’s only suite of fully-integrated OPC-based solutions available for Windows.
ICONICS’ corporate headquarters is located in Foxborough, Massachusetts (USA) near Boston. The company has offices throughout the United States, as well as in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Australia, China, France, Italy and Germany. ICONICS also has a joint software development and sales office in the Czech Republic.
ICONICS © 2007
Reproduced with permission
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