FactoryTalk
Services Platform
FactoryTalk Live Data
FactoryTalk® Live Data is part of the FactoryTalk Services Platform. It allows FactoryTalk-enabled products to discover, connect, and share real-time data in a secure, scalable manner. The basic services provided by FactoryTalk Live Data are: Read, Write, Browse and Subscribe to data items. In addition to these basic services, FactoryTalk Live Data provides user interface components that provide consistent user experience during configuration. To ensure consistent user experience in a running system, FactoryTalk Live Data includes toolkits that make it easier for Data Server developers to leverage the benefits of FactoryTalk Live Data. To further enhance the value of a FactoryTalk Live Data, it uses other FactoryTalk Services providing a consistent user experience, reuse of shared definitions and robust real-time operation. FactoryTalk Live Data is based on and supports OPC Foundation’s OPC-DA specification.
Features
FactoryTalk Live Data manages connections between product clients and servers. It reads values from, and writes values to, Data Servers in real-time on behalf of client products, such as FactoryTalk View and FactoryTalk Transaction Manager. It is based on OPC standards and can communicate to OPC–DA Servers (OLE for Process Control — Data Access Servers). FactoryTalk Live Data features the following highlights:
- Fault Tolerance and redundancy without DCOM.
- Consistent communications for Integrated Architecture controllers and third-parties via OPC.
- Leverages FactoryTalk Directory, Security and FactoryTalk Diagnostics for communications.
Benefits
The overall benefit is a consistent or standard architecture for communicating real-time values between data clients and data servers that embraces OPC standards and provides extended benefits to any FactoryTalk Services-enabled products.
- FactoryTalk Live Data-enabled clients "see" a single set of data items names or "namespace" across multiple data access servers — FactoryTalk Live Data enabled Data Servers or OPC Data Servers.
- FactoryTalk Live Data-enabled clients do not need to manage connections to multiple data servers. Configured data access server connections, as well as physical to logical name resolution, are managed by FactoryTalk Directory Services.
- FactoryTalk Live Data-enabled clients do not need to manage the health of server connections. Broken connections are restored quickly and when configured automatically connect to redundant data access servers.
- FactoryTalk Live Data-enabled products do not need to create configuration user interface. It is provided by the FactoryTalk Administration Console.
- FactoryTalk Live Data Servers can be built with a proven server toolkit technology.
- FactoryTalk Live Data Servers can support multiple logical namespaces on the same physical hardware.
- FactoryTalk Live Data Servers can utilize FactoryTalk Security authentication information from the clients to protect access to data values.
FactoryTalk Live Data has been ported to the Microsoft CE platform to extend the benefits of a standard data access layer to embedded components.