CrispTech has released the second generation Redundant Ring Self Healing Network technology from Moxa.
The Turbo Ring protocol was introduced by Moxa about four years ago to provide system integrators with a cost-effective, easy-to-configure, highly-reliable redundant ring capability for Industrial Ethernet Networks.
The new generation Turbo Ring protocol from Moxa provides users with greater flexibility in setting up redundant networks.
The new Turbo Ring provides fast fault recovery speed to ensure that your network connection runs non-stop. With networks comprising 250 Ethernet switches, recovery time is less than 20 milliseconds. Ring coupling is now more flexible, making network planning easier.
Redundancy plays an important role in increasing the reliability of systems used for industrial automation applications, and the redundant network technology called Turbo Ring, which was developed by Moxa, now provides redundant Ethernet recovery time of under 20 milliseconds.
With Moxa Turbo Ring, if any segment of the network is disconnected, your automation system will be back to normal in less than 20 milliseconds, even at a full load of 250 switches.
The new generation Moxa Turbo Ring provides users a broad choice of topologies, including ring coupling, dual-homing, and dual-ring, to give system maintainers more convenience and flexibility when setting up industrial Ethernet networks.
Ring coupling topology:
For some systems it may not be convenient to connect all devices in the system to create one BIG redundant ring, particularly since some of the devices could be located at a remote site.
Turbo Ring's ring coupling function helps you separate those distributed devices into different, smaller redundant rings, and in such a way that the smaller rings will still be able to communicate with each other.
Dual-Homing:
You may also configure a ring for dual-homing, which involves using a single Ethernet switch in one ring to connect to one or two switches in an adjacent ring.
With dual-homing, one or both rings only need one switch, making it cheaper and more convenient to provide a small number of devices with network redundancy.
Dual-homing also gives automation engineers the option of providing legacy devices with a certain level of redundancy.
For example, some PLCs may be Ethernet-ready, but only have one Ethernet port. In this case, the Moxa switch + PLC combo would represent a 1-switch ring that connects to another ring or to the network backbone.
Dual-Ring:
The dual-ring option provides another cost-saving configuration, since in this case two adjacent rings share one switch. This type of configuration is ideal for applications that have inherent cabling difficulties.
Benefits and products:
Different automation applications require different levels of redundancy. Turbo Ring provides media redundancy, and only Turbo Ring's fast 20 milliseconds recovery time is sufficient for many critical automation systems (compared with Spanning Tree Protocol which has a recovery time of several seconds).
Another great feature of the new generation Turbo Ring is that you can configure switches housed at remote sites to use Turbo Ring, and then connect the Turbo Ring to a an STP/RSTP network that uses switches from other vendors.
Mixing Turbo Rings that use Moxa switches with networks using STP/RSTP is particularly useful when you need to connect your remote industrial networks to your climate-controlled control room network.
The new generation Turbo Ring gives you fast redundant and more reliable ring solution, but with the flexibility you need to deploy sophisticated, cross-vendor networks.