Does anyone know of any alternatives to RSGuardian for doing automated backups of SLC 500 and Micrologix processors through a network? I have some 5/05 processors that are on ethernet, and can pass through to 5/03 processors on DH-485. We have roughly 30 processors in the plant. Our price for RSGuardian is $3500. I cannot find any way to justify this cost, which I find appaling. Has anyone seen any other packages that do the same thing?

--Joe Jansen

 

Take a quick look at this thread under the PLC section of the site for a couple of ideas. More may come.

Subject : PLCs
Scheduled backup of SLC/5 processor
4/14/2000, by Scott Barrett

Brian Lee Mast, P.E.
Trippel/Mast Consulting LLC
Seattle, Washington
(206) 652-8485

 

FxManager from Total Control does a similar job, however, I think it is just as expensive. $3500 doesn't seem like a lot of money for automated backup software.

Pete

 

They also have DOS based Control Guardian which is actually currently more advanced in what it can and cannot back up or should I say more "Field
tested".

Also MDT makes a product but I do not think you will like the price.

I too once complained about the price of this backup solution to back up my 50+ PLC - 5 network until at 3 different times the program (control
guardian) literally saved our bacon after a month long rebuild of a machine a vendor had made changes over a series of days and a month later we had major issues.

We were able to "produce" every days changes through out the entire shutdown (and could set it for every hour)and get the machine back up. At $600 per minute for downtime......well you get the picture.

What I do is to have daily backups of all of my PLC's at 1 am to an NT server and then I use an e-mail product (RSMailman) that e-mails the
difference reports out to each area every morning at 5 am and also to me via internet e-mail and company e-mail.

It is absolutely amazing at how many "tweaks" get made by shift personel etc. to "make it run" and would get forgotten etc. If we did not keep
reports of this automatically done.

Also we have "saved" ourselves a number of times with a "mystery" glitch that used to work last week and we go back and do comparisons of the backups and are amazed at how quickly we fix issues.

Also it is reasuring to know that you have in our case "the last 120 changes made to the program" documented automatically. I literally can tell you
every change made to one of our PLC's back to 1995 when I installed the product.

I have been involved beta testing RSGuardian and it is not there yet due to Rockwells non commitment to the product. I think every programmer working on it has quit or moved to another dept. which shows how misguided this product has been handled. (which is kind of scary). But other than that, I have paid for mine and can justify it to management numerous times over.

If you have questions e-mail me dirrectly at [email protected]

Dave Ferguson
Blandin Paper Company
UPM-Kymmene
DAVCO Automation

 

Try FxManager from GE Fanuc - its supposed to work with AB as well as Modicon and GE. But I am not sure about the pricing.

-V. Garner
GE Supply - Houston