Challenge Met: Historians and Databases Are Hard to Manage
In databases you generally have to create "tables" and within tables you create columns for data values. Also in many popular real-time data historians, like databases, those data values have to be "typed" with sometimes cryptic terms, such as "varchar", "float", "double", "Int", "Int32", "Int64", and on and on. Teams of experts must manage the database or historian, managing all this rigid constraining sets of definitions.
Intellect Historian: Just Easy
Send it *anything* and it will archive it. Automatically. If it can be converted into a binary form, it can be archived; objects, strings (text), numbers (double, int, ...) whatever. The Intellect Historian indexes it and archives it to disk at about 50,000 items per second on a standard computer.
It's a Storage Facility for "Intermediate" Intellect Results
The Intellect Server creates a lot of different information which is delivered to your shared data repository (SQL databases, PI historians, etc.) but sometimes there are intermediate calculations that need to be conveniently stored and shared within Intellect, so we archive it locally.
Using Corporate Data Facilities Can be Difficult
Many customers have Test and Productive databases and historians surrounded and protected by strict controls. Often it is easier to archive the results locally. Quick and easy.
Some Historians Are Much Too EXPEN$IVE!!
Some vendors charge you a base license, then more by the "Tag" and after adding up 100's or 1,000's of tags for a typical unit operation, or perhaps 10's of thousands of tags for a plant, well, there went a big chunk of your ROI. The Intellect Historian? It comes with Intellect and ... no fees for tags.
The Intellect Historian is tuned for real-time feeds, including financial quote streams that have 1000's of transactions per second for *each* high volume ticker. No worries. The Intellect Historian has triple buffering that handles high volumes. We have customers that run it on their laptops at home archiving 1000's of tickers with multiple tickers having thousands of transactions per second. On just a typical laptop, not even a "tuned" high-speed server, a single Intellect Historian can receive, parse and write about 50,000 items per second. Imagine what it could do on one of your high end rack mounted servers in your data center. Reading data runs at about 25,000 records per second, again on a typical laptop.