Ethernet is a fact of life. Once the province of Information Technology (IT) departments, it now reaches down to the controls and, increasingly, to the input/output (I/O) level. The advantages of enterprise-wide Ethernet networks, according to Dan Knight, an industry solution manager for Ethernet to the Factory for network equipment vendor Cisco Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif., are many.

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Manufacturing On the Move

However, this new world of Ethernet-based automation brings challenges as well as opportunities. Along with obvious security issues, it creates a situation in which network management can no longer be strictly an IT affair. Control engineers must now take on some of the burdens of network management, interfacing more closely with IT in the process. It’s not always a comfortable situation.

“This is a challenge for many companies right now as the automation networks and traditional IT networks are starting to converge,” Knight notes. “It’s an issue that has people and technology components.” On the technology side, Cisco stresses the importance of what it calls usability tools in its “Ethernet to the Factory” suite of products—tools that can reduce the level of network expertise a control engineer needs to deploy and maintain automation networks.

One of the key usability tools deployed by Cisco and others is the intelligent switch. These are managed switches with embedded software that helps optimize Ethernet networks. For one thing, they allow users to set up virtual local area networks (VLANs) to link devices in logical groups, even if those devices are in disparate locations. Thus, machine controllers in different buildings can be interfaced from a single location.

Best of all, using network management software, intelligent switches can be deployed relatively easily with the aid of a simple, graphical interface and a standard personal computer (PC) browser.

Beyond the switch, several types of dedicated traffic management systems exist. Among these are WebMux traffic management and load balancer systems from Avanu, of San Jose, Calif., units that boast easy configuration, and PC-based protocol analyzers from Frontline Test Equipment, of Charlottesville, Va. Frontline’s systems monitor networks in an effort to identify communication problems quickly, before they become major headaches.

Seeing is believing

If you want your control engineers and other plant floor professionals to take a greater role in managing the network, why not start by letting them look at it. That’s the rationale behind IntraVue software from Network Vision Inc., Newburyport, Mass.

IntraVue is a network visualization tool designed to give control engineers the ability to identify problems on the network by automatically mapping all Internet protocol (IP) devices in a network and showing their communication status on a single graphical display. In some cases, this helps control engineers aid the IT department in correcting a problem quickly. In many cases, though, it enables the plant floor personnel to correct the problem themselves. That’s because, according to Network Vision President Mark Fondl, most network disruptions are caused by the failure of the connected devices operating in the harsh plant floor environment, not by software.

“I saw that the control technicians didn’t have useful tools,” recalls Fondl. “The IT tools were geared toward network infrastructure and not toward what would happen if you placed connected devices in a hostile environment with its power surges and its extremes of temperature, vibration and noise. It was similar to the very early ...