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gHost (part of GTS Group) is pleased to announce the release of gSharp, a fully-featured alternative to PI ACE; designed to provide a simple and cost-effective migration of your existing ACE calculations. Offering all the features you’re used to, gSharp adds advanced logging features and an intuitive UI for calculation management, scheduling, and backfilling.
If you have a valuable library of analyses in PI ACE, like many other PI ACE users around the world, you’ll need to make a choice about what to do when PI ACE is retired at the end of 2023. While Asset Analytics is AVEVA’s answer to PI ACE deprecation, it may not provide the flexibility to implement your PI ACE algorithms. Another option is to simply rebuild, but this would be a costly and time-consuming solution.
In response to these challenges, gHost presents gSharp – a cost-effective replacement for PI ACE. Rather than face the expensive and time-consuming task of rewriting your PI ACE modules, you can substantially ‘Lift and Shift‘ your valuable libraries into gSharp with ease.
Migrate and enhance your existing PI ACE code with these key gSharp features:
The AVEVA (formerly OSIsoft) Advanced Calculation Engine (ACE) is no longer available to buy, and support for the PI ACE product ceases in December 2023. AVEVA has nominated Asset Analytics as an alternative but the reality is that it’s not a complete solution.
Users have reported a number of areas where Asset Analytics just don’t provide the power or flexibility of PI ACE:
There are still 3 key areas where ACE beats [Asset] Analytics
The biggest takeaway here with regards to your overall question of “Can we ignore ACE and start using AF analytics in future?” is really going to be depending on your own uses of the PI System … ACE is “Programmed Analytics” which as of yet has no replacement. If you use, and truly require, ACE in the context of this type of custom coding, then you can’t yet ignore ACE altogether.
There are … complex ACE codes, which we feel, won’t be feasible for AF conversion. These complex codes are:
For many users, the retirement of PI ACE presents problems because of the scale or complexity of their existing PI ACE code base. Some things just can’t be migrated to Asset Analytics, and even if they were, the effort to do so may be prohibitive. Users have made a substantial investment in the configuration of PI ACE code and losing that value is undesirable.
gSharp offers a simple alternative that preserves the value in your PI ACE libraries and gives you a clear and straightforward path to maintain your analyses, while replacing unsupported PI System components.
Users are finding there’s no complete or satisfactory answer to the question of how to replace PI ACE. What is needed is a simple, supported solution that can easily and cost-effectively migrate and preserve the investment made in scripted analyses, with the deprecation of PI ACE.
The stock answer is ‘Use Asset Analytics’ but in the real-world … there are several instances where Asset Analytics is the poor or insufficient choice
GTS Group is Australia’s premier real-time data specialist, and leading PI System solution provider boasting several former OSIsoft engineers on staff. With the largest PI accredited engineering team in the country, GTS created the gHost division to lead our growing R&D activity, developing our hosted solutions and our subscription applications, including gSharp.
Our gHost team began the development of gSharp in 2022 in response to the upcoming retirement of PI ACE and the lack of suitable alternatives.
Our primary aim was to provide a high degree of compatibility for existing PI ACE calculations, allowing them to be ported with minimal refactoring of code; and engineering a solution to use AFSDK in place of the deprecated PI-SDK; as well as contextual calculations using PI Asset Framework in lieu of the deprecated PI Module Database.
Our secondary objective was to enhance rather than simply replace PI ACE. We added a clean and intuitive interface to manage calculations, support for AF and PI collectives, and comprehensive logging capability.
GTS is Australia’s premier real-time data specialist, and leading PI System solution provider boasting several former OSIsoft engineers on staff. With the largest accredited engineering team in the country, GTS created the gHost division to lead our growing R&D activity, developing our hosted solutions and our subscription applications, including gSharp.
Recognising the lack of suitable options, our gHost team began the development of gSharp in 2022, ahead of the retirement of PI ACE.
Our primary aim was to provide a high degree of compatibility for existing PI ACE calculations, allowing them to be ported with minimal refactoring of code; and engineering a solution to use AFSDK in place of the deprecated PI-SDK; as well as contextual calculations using PI Asset Framework in lieu of the deprecated PI Module Database.
Our secondary objective was to enhance rather than simply replace PI ACE. We added a clean and intuitive interface to manage calculations, support for AF and PI collectives, and comprehensive logging capability.
Logging
Utilising the NLog framework, gSharp provides highly flexible logging for all aspects of the core engine and client code. Logs can be viewed and analysed directly from the Calculation Manager.
Calculation Development
.Net Framework-based, supporting development of calculation assemblies in any .Net language — VB.Net, C#, and F#.
Management
Completely manage your calculations from assembly registration, context management, and scheduling. Through our intuitive desktop UI.
Scheduling
gSharp supports multiple calculations running on either clock-based or event-based triggers. Its versatility can also be found in the availability of multiple clock schedules and cron-based schedule configurations, allowing flexibility in your calculations.
Compatible but modern
PI ACE programmatic compatibility layer comprising of fully AFSDK based re-implementations of the PIACEPoint, PIACENetClassModule, and PIACEBIFunctions classes.
Contextual calculations using PI Asset Framework in lieu of the deprecated PI Module Database.
Asset Analytics is not a complete solution to replace valuable libraries of PI ACE analyses. There are simply some things not supported. For many users, the alternative task of rewriting PI ACE code to Asset Analytics would be a massive (and costly) undertaking.
gSharp provides the compatible, modernised and enhanced alternative to PI ACE. A simple and affordable pathway to retaining the value in your PI ACE code investment and moving to a platform developed and supported by some of the best PI System specialists in the world.
Contact us to start a discussion about how we can help you transition away from the deprecated PI ACE to gSharp – the modern alternative.
Level 16 & 17, 1 Denison Street
North Sydney, NSW 2060
Australia
+61 1300 241 717
sales@gtsgroup.com.au
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