Distributed collective deployments

Data Archive collectives can be geographically-distributed. For example, you might deploy the primary Data Archive server and one secondary Data Archive server at a local operations center, and deploy two secondary servers at a remote backup operations center. You can configure workstations to connect to their local servers before connecting to remote servers. You might even configure some workstations to connect only to local servers. Such a configuration separates loads and separates functions between the operations centers.

You might have interfaces at both operations centers. You might configure the interfaces to use n-way buffering to send time-series data to all the servers in the Data Archive collective. However, to reduce network traffic, you might have the primary Data Archive server send configuration information and outputs only to the interfaces at its local center and have a secondary Data Archive server send configuration information to interfaces at the remote center.

You can also use the PI to PI interface to aggregate data between Data Archive collectives. For example, you might have a collective that collects data at each plant, and have a separate collective at your headquarters that gathers key indicators from the plants.