Industrial Ethernet shows signs of recovery
A
GarrettCom Europe product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Apr 8, 2004
With Magnum 6K16V managed Ethernet switches incorporating S-Ring redundancy management software, resilient Gigabit Ethernet networks can now function with just 500ms fault recovery delay.
The need for rising transfer speeds has seen the evolution of Gigabit Ethernet for industrial use.
But although Gigabit Ethernet provides a "large pipe" to alleviate network congestion by providing a high speed and increased bandwidth solution, unacceptable fault recovery times caused by the inherent problems of Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) has seen industries having to put up with potentially disastrous network down times.
Previously industry has traded bandwidth size for recovery speed but by using Magnum 6K16V Managed Ethernet switches, incorporating GarrettCom's new S-Ring redundancy management software, resilient Gigabit Ethernet networks can now function with just 500ms fault recovery delay.
Industrial applications, once considered to be the province of slow serial connections, are now able to find useful applications in the higher bandwidths.
GarrettCom's new S-Ring redundancy management software builds upon the same foundation as the industry-standard Spanning Tree Protocol, including the use of status-checking multicast packets (BPDUs) sent out by STP that move around the ring to show that things are functioning normally.
The benefit of using S-Ring is in what happens when the ring is broken.
Spanning Tree takes time to analyse the fault before issuing instructions on how to reroute data flow.
S-Ring technology is purely ring based and therefore can immediately issue directions to the nodes along the ring to reroute around the fault - resulting in less than a 500ms fault recovery delay.
S-Ring enables Magnum 6K managed industrial Ethernet switches to simplify and speed up recovery from faults in Ethernet LAN configurations that use a ring structure, without interfering with standard STP operation.
S-Ring operates from specifically defined port pairs that have ring-topology Ethernet devices attached.
Each of the two ends of a ring must be connected to two ports in a Magnum 6K Switch that is running the S-Ring software.
The user configures and controls S-Ring as part of the 6K switch's management software.
S-Ring can be used in multivendor LANs running standard STP on the Magnum 6K switches along with other switches and hubs in any redundant LAN topology, including rings and meshes.
S-Ring makes Ethernet ring-topology more reliable and faster without sacrificing the benefit of standards-based interoperability.
S-Ring works in exactly the same way with Gigabit networks as it does on 100 and 10Mbit/s, subject to the timing specifications of the Gigabit standard.
Those timing specifications mean that S-Ring runs a bit slower on Gigabit than it does on 100Mbit/s, but the product is exactly the same and therefore requires no additional engineering by GarrettCom.
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