Gopal GopalKrishnan gave an excellent presentation about Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) at the OSISoft Users Conference this year. For many years, Gopal has been the go to guy at OSIsoft when it comes to this subject. What we are seeing now is the result of his, and others, efforts over the years working with OSIsoft customers…

Microsoft will end support of Windows Server 2003 on July 14th, 2015. Microsoft will no longer provide security fixes and updates for the OS after this date. It is imperative that you develop a plan to upgrade any PI servers or interface computers that you have running this OS. Upgrading your PI Server is usually…

I think that we have all had the experience before where you sit in a training class, some of the information in the class is relevant to what you do, and some is not. At times, you sit there with your eyes glazed over bored to tears. You feel good finishing the class, but as…

[update 10/8/14 – There is an OSIsoft alert (OSIsoft site login required) that PI Server 2012 is only supported on Windows Server 2012 R2 if Microsoft patch 2963918 is installed on the server. This fixes an issue with the VSS backups. I successfully upgraded the secondary server of my PI development collective to Windows Server 2012 R2. The…

The new PI Interface Configuration Utility (ICU) was just released and posted to the download area on vCampus. It posted with a Windows XP End of Life notice. It would be interesting to know the percentage of PI interface computers out there still running on XP. I’m sure that it would not be an insignificant…

This article  should be a call to action to update our nation’s electric grid. NASA’s STEREO space craft detected that a coronal mass ejection that would have been similar in scale to the Carrington Event, would have hit the earth if it had happened 9 days earlier.  The big fear is that the energy surge…

It’s such a good time to be a PI Guy. This article sums up the challenges that utilities face. Accurate and timely information is the key to managing most of them. Smart Grid: Utilities: The 9 things to worry about most. 6. IT/OT integration. Our operational technology increasing has a big IT component in the form…

I also read another article about the government wanting to require all cars to communicate with each other. It seems that we are quickly going down the road to hacker heaven. Now would seem like a good time to re-evaluate our approach and begin with security in mind for all of these things. It is…

Good morning. Given the range of issues on CIOs’ agendas — from security to the cloud — our poll on top strategic matters might have produced any number of credible results. However, the importance of analytics as a business tool emerged Tuesday as this year’s top strategic priority. The poll was taken during the Wall…