SCADA licensing support needed

[Anonymous user]

Dear Experts,

Would you please help me to figure-out the best suitable SCADA software (Probably Geo SCADA or else if there any) with number of required licenses for a specific SCADA project of Oil transportation Pipeline?

Basic Information:

There are 1 dispatch station, 2 Receiving Stations, 1 Intermediate pigging station and 6 Nos. of valve stations through the 250 Km Pipeline. All the terminals & valve stations will have 1 RTU. SO total 9 Nos. of RTU's.

There will be 1 Main Master Station (MMS) and a Backup station with the below hardware:

-4 Nos. of SCADA server at 2 stations (Redundant in each station);    -2 Nos. of History server;    -2 Nos of Web server;

 -2 nos of OPC server; - 1 nos. of GPS server and -4 nos of SCADA work stations; - 2 Nos. of APPS (Leak detection System) server;  - 2 nos. of APPS software.

Total Nos. of Tags from all stations = 920 (Approx.);

Total Nos. of Alarms = 1200;

The communication will be done by optical fiber placed along the pipeline.

According to above architecture, is it possible to calculate the number of required software licenses and the software costs of the SCADA project? I'm not experienced on SCADA and never did such project. Please let me know if I'm forwarding in the wrong direction.

Thanks

[BevanWeiss]

It's not easy to give a price for 'SCADA', the licencing model for each SCADA product is different, and often depends on the end user themselves (i.e. if you want a price for Geo SCADA Expert, and your end user already has lots of licences for Geo SCADA Expert then they are likely to get better pricing, possibly just in an Enterprise Agreement).

Depending on the SCADA the pricing can be based on:

1. Number of servers
2. Number of clients
3. Number of points (some DCS-style platforms have these as 'loops' which might have several points)
4. Number of drivers / interfaces, this can include which protocols are used downstream (i.e. DNP3 / Ethernet), or what protocols are used upstream (OPC / ODBC), or what reporting is provided (i.e. only internal, or report generation/distribution)
5. Number of displays (FTView is in this bag)
6. Whether historical data is required, sometimes even how much historical data is needed etc

You could send your information to multiple sales people (for each SCADA platform you may be interested in), they will be in the best position to give you pricing.  It really can vary a lot.

As an SI, we wouldn't advertise in this manner what our pricing would be either... since often we get advantageous price breaks compared to end-users (or other SIs).