This is very important as more and more enterprise applications require communications with factory floor devices and many of those are something other than Microsoft.Ħ. The biggest advantage to having OPC UA in a device is the ability to provide seamless communication to systems based on Linux and other non-Microsoft platforms. This architecture is a huge step forward over Classic OPC.ĥ. OPC UA combines the Data Access, Historian, Alarm and Events and all the rest of the OPC Classic specifications into a single entity with an Object-based model. The web services technology used in UA has a much more effective, robust, and up to date security layer than the one found in COM.Ĥ. OPC UA is based on an SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and the Web Services transport layer. If you’re running an OPC application on an old Windows box you might as well put the sign “Hackers Welcome!” on your front lawn.ģ. Over the 20 or more years since its implementation, Ethernet security has advanced way beyond what was put into the original COM and DCOM. COM does have some serious security flaws. The COM technology is obsolete and unsupported by Microsoft.Ģ. OPC Classic has one major deficiency – COM and DCOM. Here’s ten things that you should know about OPC Classic and the transition to OPC UA: Well, OPC, now often referred to as OPC Classic, is now being displaced by OPC UA. In fact, if you know of an automation environment that doesn’t use OPC in some way I’d like to hear about it. OPC has found its way into most factory floor architectures. Tens of thousands of these Clients and Servers have been deployed for thousands of devices over the years. DCOM allows Clients on one Windows platform to read from and write to Servers on the same machine or on machines distributed across a network. So, a Siemens controller OPC server on Windows embeds the proprietary S7 protocol and provides the data to OPC Clients embedded in Historians, HMIs, Trend Analyzers and all sorts of other Windows devices.ĬOM (Component Object Model) and DCOM (Distributed COM) are the basic Microsoft transport technologies that provide the standard communications architecture between the Clients and Servers. OPC Servers embed the proprietary communications protocol of some automation device and make it available to one or more OPC Clients. OPC provides a standardized way to move data between two dissimilar systems as long as you are using Windows and Microsoft technology. It has been around forever and has been unarguably one of the most successful technologies to ever hit the factory floor. It’s hard to work almost anywhere in the automation industry without knowing something about OPC.
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