Hello everybody,

For the moment our company is planning to switch from an older version to the PI system 2010.
The main reason is that with this system alarms (RtAlerts) can be send out to users when certain data is in a certain range.
Now the questions is: if switching from the PI 2008 version to the PI 2010 version, can this give complications?
Does anyone know the advantages and disadvantages of the PI 2010 version in comparison to the 2008 version.

For the moment we are sending the data through a serial port to an Universal File Loader interface, collecting the data in tags and processing them in Processbook.
Certain elements in Processbook are custom made with OCX files.

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Do you know where to find a general manual for PI2008 and PI2010 or something that gives a broad overview of the difference between these two?
This, because I need to make a report to convince the company to switch to PI2010.
I already found some interesting movies about PI2010 on youtube, that can guide me away.

Hi arnow,

As Squatty says, you will need new hardware to run the PI-AF stuff (you can run it on the same box as the PI server, but as it uses an SQL back end then it will just eat system resources). As for PI 2010 as a product, well you get PI-AF, PI-ACE, and PI Notifications as standard. If you are going to use the functionality of all of those then upgrading to PI2010 is for you.

PI-AF - I'll admit I'm struggling to find out what it's trying to sell itself as. Is it an analysis tool, does it make displaying data between similar plant units easier, is it a cost reduction tool?? Maybe someone that is actuallly using it to it's full potential will be able to give you (and me) a better idea of what it's good at.

PI-ACE - good for doing advanced calcs but if you can do it in performance equations then is there a real need to move to PI2010?

PI-Notifications - you can email every man and his dog based on PI tags and escalate that if it is not acknowledge or persists for a period of time. As a seperate product it's quite pricey compared to an alternative; we use TopView (I think it was the original PI notifications, but was spun out by some developers into it's own product) and it does most, if not all, that Pi Notifications can at a fraction of the cost ($6000) for a full licence, unlimited tag count.

I've tried to do a cost justification for upgrading to PI2010 and it's very difficult if you can't quantify any appreciable costs savings, useability improvements, or work process streamlining.

The cost of the upgrade to PI 2010 is roughly £50k (well thats what we were quoted). I wanted to move to a 2 PI server configuration, where we had one server on the site IT network, and the other behind a firewall on the control system side, using a PI-to-PI link between the 2 (not a collective as that comes with other issues); the 2nd PI 2010 server was costed as £100k (thats when my boss slammed the door in my face).

In my opinion if PI 2008 does what you need then there is no need to upgrade. The 2008 version of PI has just had a new update released so it's still being supported/updated by OSI.

Ok thanks guys for the interesting information!