Many SCADA Historians Make Light Work

How a new approach to managing historical data is helping a FL utility prepare for the future.

By Christopher Little, Trihedral Engineering Limited

GRU is the 5th largest municipal utility in Florida and serves over 100,000 people. In 1999, the utility unified much of its monitoring & control infrastructure into a single SCADA system based on VTScada HMI software from Trihedral. By 2011, the system had grown considerably to include many new features and remote sites. Over time, one of the challenges became how to manage the historical data being logged 24/7 from over 6,700 data points so that it could be easily accessed by both operators and engineers. At the same time, Trihedral had created version 10 of VTScada which included a new historian that had been rebuilt to deal specifically with these types of issues in large data-rich applications. In this article, Trihedral President and VTScada Chief Architect, Glenn Wadden, describes the new design and how it is helping the utility meet its disparate needs.