The PI System Described

The PI System collects, stores, and manages data from your plant or process. You connect your
data sources to one or more PI Interface nodes. The interface nodes get the data from your data
sources and send it to the Data Archive. Data is stored in the Data Archive and is accessible in
the assets defined in Asset Framework (AF). Data can be accessed either directly from the Data
Archive or from the AF Server using tools in the PI Visualization Suite (PVS) such as PI
ProcessBook. Because of the usability advantages of AF, users are encouraged to consume
data by accessing the AF Server rather than directly accessing the Data Archive.

The following is a diagram of the components of a typical PI System:

Architecture of a Typical PI System

Sometimes the architecture can be very simple. Some customers have as few as one or two
interfaces feeding data to a Data Archive, from which the data can be read through various
applications. The following is an example of a fully developed PI System which includes most of
the widely used OSIsoft products.
PI Server = Data Archive + PI Asset Framework (AF)

In some companies, there are many Data Archives used for aggregating data.

Note: In computer security, a demilitarized zone, named after the military usage of the term and
normally abbreviated to DMZ; also known as a Data Management Zone or Demarcation Zone or
Perimeter Network, is a physical or logical subnetwork that contains and exposes an
organization's external services to a larger, untrusted network, usually the Internet. The purpose
of a DMZ is to add an additional layer of security to an organization's Local Area Network (LAN);
an external attacker only has access to equipment in the DMZ, rather than the whole of the
network. [Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org]