Geo SCADA to S7-1500

[Anag]

Hello everyone,

We are planning for a Geo SCADA system that will have some Siemens S7-1500 PLCs, and I'm wondering what will be the better option to monitor and control these PLCs; is it Geo SCADA Siemens S7 driver or OPC UA? and what are the advantages/disadvantages of each?

I know that with Siemens S7 driver, the documentation doesn't mention support for S7-1500 but I know it can be done with unoptimised block access and using absolute addresses, which might be a disadvantage. But are there any advantages using this driver than using OPC UA?

[BevanWeiss · Accepted solution]

The OPC-UA usage within S7-1500 does require a license for each PLC.  It's not an expensive license, but it's a factor.

The OPC-UA protocol itself is also 'heavier' than S7Comm protocol.

I don't believe that the GeoSCADA Expert driver supports S7Plus protocol (symbolic for the optimized DBs on S7-1200/1500).

Unoptimized DBs also have a 64kB size limit, which doesn't apply to Optimized DBs.

It will depend on what you ultimately need.  If you have big DBs, OPC-UA might be your only option for GeoSCADA Expert.  If you just have a small bit of data that you can marshal through an Unoptimized DB, then I'd probably go that way.

[geoffpatton]

@BevanWeiss Does the driver even work for the 1500? It was not clearly answered in this post about a 1200.

https://community.se.com/t5/EcoStruxure-Geo-SCADA-Expert/Simatic-s7-driver-with-PLC-1200/m-p/438024?...

[BevanWeiss]

@geoffpatton if you're targeting Unoptimized DBs, then an S7-1500 is identical in behaviour to an S7-300/S7-400.  So no issues there.
It's just around the Optimized DBs that the problem arises (i.e. if you want to use fancier data types, or >64kB of data per DB).  Then you can either go the Siemens S7-1500 OPC-UA server, or a third party OPC (DA/XML/UA) server that talks S7Plus.
I don't think GeoSCADA's Siemens S7 driver will support Optimized DB access anytime soon.  It's a pretty locked down (proprietary) protocol, and not particularly well supported in other SCADA platforms either.  I'm currently using Wonderware Intouch that supports it in the SIDirect driver.  But we've had lots of bugs with the PLC<->Visualisation end-to-end that seem Optimized DB / S7Plus specific.