Late in the summer of 2008 Hurricane Ike wrought extensive damage along the Gulf Coast of the United States. Many companies, large and small, worked together round the clock before and during the storm to protect their assets and to prevent large-scale environmental damage. As part of this effort, Cogent supplied Arizona Automation, a system integration company for the oil industry, a custom DataHub script in a late-hour effort to avert disaster.

Written and tested a few scant hours before the hurricane hit, the script was used to ping devices on the oil company WAN to see if they were operational during the storm, and the results were sent by the OPC DataHub to an HMI. In fact, two field sites out of seventy-seven did fail to respond, and the oil company was able to send someone out to shut down those wells before any spills occurred.

"Cogent really came through for us with this script," said Steve Jechura, of Arizona Automation, "and the OPC DataHub did the job very well. It was actually pretty cool how it all worked."

This week the developers at Cogent Real Time Systems made available a new version of the OPC DataHub (v6.4.10) on the website for downloads. This release is the culmination of months of work to fix minor bugs, improve timer and clock resynchronization support, bolster TCP plug-in connectivity, and speed up the internal functioning of the OPC DataHub and DataHub scripts in several areas.

"You won't notice very many changes in functionality on this release," said Andrew Thomas, President of Cogent, "but under the hood things are running better than ever. With this release in place, we are now focusing our development efforts on some entirely new features for the OPC DataHub, which will be announced in the coming months.

Protocol Automation Technologies Pvt. Ltd., in Bangalore, India, is a distributor for leading SCADA and data connectivity products. Protocol supplies a wide range of OPC-based solutions to allow their customers across vertical markets to access and integrate data from almost any automation system available, and transfer it to any standard IT database platform.

"We are particularly pleased with the functionality that the OPC DataHub provides," said Mihir Gangoly, Managing Director of Protocol. "It is equally at home connecting automation systems, feeding data to ERP databases, and displaying live plant data in a web page."