Moxa Presents Industrial Ethernet Network Solution

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At this year´s SPS/IPC/Drives show in Nuremberg, Moxa will present its new network management software for Industrial Ethernet networks, Turbo Chain.
 
Turbo Chain is a layer 2 protocol that provides recovery of the network communication in case of a single switch failure, or a single link failure between switches. Its recovery time is less than 20 milliseconds with 250 switches in one chain. It offers flexible network topologies and co-works with RSTP.
 
A linear network of switches, a so-called chain, contains a head switch and a tail switch. Each end switch on the chain connects to another network. When all links in the chain are operational, the tail switch blocks the port connected to the other network.
 
In case of inter-switch link failure, the adjacent nodes to the failed link block the affected ports and report the failure to the chain. The tail switch port then transitions from blocked to forwarding to keep the network communication available.
 
Inter-switch link recovery works as follows: when the failed link recovers, the connected ports of the adjacent nodes keep blocking traffic. The adjacent nodes report the link recovery to the chain. Then the tail port transitions to blocked state and notifies the adjacent nodes to transition their ports to forwarding again.
 
The main benefit of Turbo Chain is the high availability through a fast recovery time, which goes along with a standard interoperability approach that protects existing investments. Sub-system expansion becomes easy and reduces installation costs while increasing redundancy without any network modification. Turbo chain also provides a scalable solution for I/O device redundancy as it eliminates switch single point of failure, increases I/O device network redundancy, reduces cabling costs and offers a unified device switch design.
 

Friday, October 23, 2009

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