I bought a few white boxes from a noname vendor. Service was horrible (this is my experience only, yours may vary), and ended up spending more than I saved in time. It took me 4 weeks to get a new HD for the machine. With IBM or Dell, it is delivered via Next Day Air at a minumum, usually a courier within 4 hours. The time you spend screwing around with the cheap servers will quickly exceed the money you saved. There is also the fact that the cheapies never quite fit in the rack right, they don't have any cable management equipment, and the cases are usually so cheap, they will cut you every time you open them.
I have spent the last 5 years of my life doing the same thing. My plant finally finished upgrading our entire proprietary system to a new, custom designed data tracking and control system.
There are a few things to keep in mind...
PLC's are notorius for having poorly written ethernet communications code. They can really screw up your network. We keep them on separate VLANs.
Make sure your control software can talk to everything you need on the plant floor.
OPC compliance can help, but it can be buggy. Make sure you test all components thouroughly.
We had many custom VB6/VB5 programs running on NT. For those that could not be updated easily, or we did not have source code for, or were too expensive to upgrade, we moved them to VMWare ESX Server with the P2V assistant. It was a lifesaver.
We use GEFanuc's product iFix for our HMI. There are many other similar products out there from many different vendors. Most of them have very restrictive and expensive licensing. iFix fit us the best at the time.
We moved all of the old junk desktop/tower server machines to proper rack mount servers and virtual machines.
Develop a good relationship with a good automation integrator. They can help you more than you think.
that took over a lot of smaller ISPs. When we took them over, the transition was not smooth. We lost a lot of customers because of increased hold time and the fact that we did not know the quirks of each little ISP.
I would like to say that we still gave the customers good service, but it was still not up to par with what they had before. The company I worked for no longer cared about the small ISP customers. They just wanted to switch them over to their national dialup as soon as possible. Benefits like shell access and customized email filtering options were eliminated from the customers accounts without warning. Local dial-up numbers were shut off and the customers were now dialing into 3rd party POPS.
I would guess that at least a third of the original customers were lost at each ISP we bought.
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I bought a few white boxes from a noname vendor. Service was horrible (this is my experience only, yours may vary), and ended up spending more than I saved in time. It took me 4 weeks to get a new HD for the machine. With IBM or Dell, it is delivered via Next Day Air at a minumum, usually a courier within 4 hours. The time you spend screwing around with the cheap servers will quickly exceed the money you saved. There is also the fact that the cheapies never quite fit in the rack right, they don't have any cable management equipment, and the cases are usually so cheap, they will cut you every time you open them.
- PLC's are notorius for having poorly written ethernet communications code. They can really screw up your network. We keep them on separate VLANs.
- Make sure your control software can talk to everything you need on the plant floor.
- OPC compliance can help, but it can be buggy. Make sure you test all components thouroughly.
- We had many custom VB6/VB5 programs running on NT. For those that could not be updated easily, or we did not have source code for, or were too expensive to upgrade, we moved them to VMWare ESX Server with the P2V assistant. It was a lifesaver.
- We use GEFanuc's product iFix for our HMI. There are many other similar products out there from many different vendors. Most of them have very restrictive and expensive licensing. iFix fit us the best at the time.
- We moved all of the old junk desktop/tower server machines to proper rack mount servers and virtual machines.
- Develop a good relationship with a good automation integrator. They can help you more than you think.
If you want specifics, feel free to email me.The only way I could see this happening is if you bought a controlling interest of a MB manufacturer stock. Think of it as an investment.
This is typical tech-tv article. Nothing to it. He bitches about the browser and says that Mac's are expensive.
that took over a lot of smaller ISPs. When we took them over, the transition was not smooth. We lost a lot of customers because of increased hold time and the fact that we did not know the quirks of each little ISP. I would like to say that we still gave the customers good service, but it was still not up to par with what they had before. The company I worked for no longer cared about the small ISP customers. They just wanted to switch them over to their national dialup as soon as possible. Benefits like shell access and customized email filtering options were eliminated from the customers accounts without warning. Local dial-up numbers were shut off and the customers were now dialing into 3rd party POPS. I would guess that at least a third of the original customers were lost at each ISP we bought.