Timebase Historian Migrations
If you are like many manufacturers out there you might feel like your data is held hostage by extremely high process historian licensing costs. These costs might even be “subject to change at any time” leading to more money out of your budget to keep things in compliance with regulations and have access to the data you need to make business decisions.
One of our process historian migration customers, a large oil & gas company, had their OSI/AVEVA PI license costs tied to the price of a barrel of oil. This seemed like a great deal for them when the price of oil when they bought the software and oil was around $40 a barrel, and led to sticker shock horror when it came time to renew the license and the price had more than doubled! No new tags, no new servers, just double the cost for the same data they were already storing.
This led them to immediately figure out an alternative and move away from OSI/AVEVA PI as quickly as possible before they had to bite the bullet and pay extortion level prices.
In recent years there has been a push to get rid of these wild license prices, moving to things like Ignition’s Tag Historian Module with a one time up front cost, or Canary Labs cheaper than the competition pricing for a great product. In recent years, even Canary Labs has begun raising their prices leaving the Ignition Historian as the most cost effective solution, along with some additional data storage requirements using a SQL database instead of easily compressed timeseries data.
A relative new-comer to the market, Timebase Historian, is seeking to stop the bleeding with a completely free and fully functional alternative.
How does Timebase pay the bills if it is free?
Flow Software, creators of Timebase, offer a powerful data analytics platform. Their hope is by using Timebase and getting value from their free process historian you will utilize their analytics platform to gain better understanding of your process.
Their data analytics platform offers a lot of powerful features including, but not limited to:
KPI Projection and AI Integrations
In today’s world with ever-increasing discussion and the power of AI and agents Flow Software has your bases covered. Before the AI boom they had KPI project tools, using various linear regression techniques to project your plant’s KPIs based on historical data. This gives you a forecast of where you are headed during any given shift or week so you can plan production needs accordingly.
Flow Software also offers an AI gateway in their Information Hub giving AI agents, users, and systems structured access to your models, rules, and contextual data using Flow Software’s MCP server.
Downtime Tracking, OEE, and Asset Monitoring
Given the high cost of downtime many manufacturing companies have taken advantage of OEE and Downtime Tracking to help run their processes at the most profitable production levels possible. Flow Software offers a full suite of OEE and Downtime Tracking tools in their Information Hub giving you the ability to track this critical information across your entire facility.
Flow Software’s Information Hub also gives you the ability to do asset monitoring. Depending on your needs this might mean utility and efficiency information, operating parameters and KPIs, and can even extend to things like predictive maintenance.
Data Integration
Flow Software allows you to connect basically any systems you have to their Information Hub. This includes MQTT and OPC-UA Servers (great for Ignition integrations!), relational databases, and various APIs available in other software tools.
Everything is then made available to your users using a web browser, giving them the ability to access your dashboards, KPIs, and reports on any device.
Unified Namespace and API integrations
The core of the Flow Software technology stack is the Unified Namespace (UNS). This gives you the ability to either create and manage your UNS in Flow’s Information Hub, or it can connect to your existing infrastructure if you already have a Unified Namespace set up.
Flow Software’s Information Hub also provides a fully featured API giving you the ability to connect any other technology you might be using to pull relevant data and information out of your Flow Software system.
Charts, Dashboards, and Reporting
Any data integration tool worth its salt will give you the ability to create and manage charts for viewing data over time, dashboards for viewing data in an easy to understand way in real-time, and give you the ability to create and manage reports.
Flow Software’s Information Hub has all of these boxes checked out of the box!
Manual Data Entry
If you are looking to move away from paper based processes, and/or integrate quality management data Flow Software’s Information Hub gives you the ability to create forms to manage manual data entry, integrating the data your users enter with all of your other process data, KPIs, and dashboards.
How do I access my data stored in Timebase?
Timebase Explorer
Timebase includes the Timebase Explorer tool giving you a fully featured trending option with no other software required. This lets you trend any data stored in your Timebase historian with various industry standard capabilities built right in.
Information Hub
Timebase can be easily set up as a datasource for the Flow Software Information Hub allowing you to utilize your Timebase historical data in all of the features and functionality available in Information Hub, including calculations, KPIs, dashboards, charts, API integrations, and reports.
API Integration
Timebase also provides an API to interface with all of your data and tags giving you the ability to query any information about your Timebase system in any other software tool you might need to integrate with.
Ignition Module
One of the most powerful ways to leverage Timebase is by using their Ignition Module to set up Timebase as a historical tag provider. We will go deeper on this in the next section.
What about Ignition Integration?
Flow Software put together an Ignition Module to integrate Timebase Historian as a Historical Tag Provider.
This gives you the ability to use Timebase the same way you would set up the normal Ignition Historian, uses all of your existing Ignition tags and UDTs and stores the data directly to Timebase.
Integrating Timebase with Ignition also lets you use Timebase as the foundation for all of your trends, reports, and dashboards in Ignition.
You do still need to purchase the Ignition Historian Module to take advantage of this, however given the overall functionality of timebase and the significantly smaller data footprint compared to the SQL-based data storage using the Ignition Historian this gives you the best of all worlds!
What platforms can you migrate to Timebase Historian?
If you have data stored in a database or any existing process historian we can migrate it to Timebase. This includes, and is not limited to:
OSIPI / AVEVAPI Historians
FactoryTalk Historian
Wonderware / AVEVA Historian
Canary Labs
Ignition
While the top 4 items on this list already use compression algorithms and focus on timeseries data, converting existing Ignition historian data will let you take advantage of the much smaller data footprint in Timebase compared to the SQL-based data storage in Ignition’s historian module.
What’s the catch?
The one catch is while Timebase historian is free, the migration process isn’t. That said, working with Corso Systems on a Timebase migration is effectively white glove service.
We parse through your existing data, map out all of your tags and data, set up data collection in Timebase, then clean up any bad quality data, and migrate everything using our automated tools, along with data verification. If we have questions on anything, or you would like to do some restructuring of your data during the migration we will work with you at every step along the way.
This means you will lose nothing in a migration. All of your existing tags and data will be migrated and validated once everything is moved to Timebase.
Depending on the amount of data you have in your existing historian there will also be a time component involved. Based on our experience Timebase ingests data at an incredibly fast rate for massive amounts of tags. That said we still need to chunk things up when migrating data so it is not an instant process.
Typically most migrations can be completed within 2 weeks from project kick off, although this may be extended a bit if you are looking at more than a few years or more than a few hundred thousand tags. Before we begin the project we provide an estimate of how long it will take.
Wrapping Up
We were excited to see Flow Software release the Timebase Historian, completely for free, without compromising on any features you need in a process historian.
As we have seen more customers start using Timebase, and as we have seen many companies migrate their historians to avoid hefty licensing fees Timebase is an incredible tool in the manufacturing world.
Combining Timebase with Ignition is basically a no-brainer, the combination gives you the best of all worlds in the SCADA technology universe, and gives you a completely flexible and scalable platform to run your manufacturing operations more efficiently and increase your profit margins!
