Network Administration

Network Management Opens Up

You don't want to ask your control engineers to double as IT experts, but forward-looking companies are asking them to take a greater role in network management.

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.

“Manufacturers are competing in a global environment, often against companies with lower cost structures,” notes Knight. “As a result, manufacturing companies need to be more flexible and efficient to be successful in a globally competitive market. By integrating data from different functions throughout the value chain, from the factory floor to supply chain through to engineering and sales and service, Ethernet enables that flexibility and efficiency.”

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.

Importantly, these switches help ensure device availability through traffic management features. For instance, some I/O devices have limited reception capability, so switches can manage multicast traffic, directing that traffic only to desired recipients so that devices aren’t overwhelmed with unwanted and unneeded messages. Intelligent switches can also prioritize traffic so that mission-critical data, such as motion control information, receives highest priority and always passes through the network even if the network is congested. Knight stresses that these switches’ auto-configuration options, together with the fact that configurations can be stored on flash memory devices for quick replacement, helps simplify control level network management so that “control engineers don’t need to become network/IT experts.”

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. Read more...

Bringing Down the Wall - I’m just back from a number of conferences and trade shows where Ethernet is a core subject for the factory floor.

This may be “pure” commercial Ethernet or one of the variety of industrial flavors - EtherCat, EtherNet/IP, Found-ation Fieldbus HSE, PowerLink, ProfiNet. Trade show booths abound with products previously seen only at information technology gatherings - managed and unmanaged switches, routers, hubs. So, it looks as if an engineer skilled at machine or process control and device level networks now must learn the skills of a corporate network administrator.

People often talk of the split between IT and engineering. Conversations about this topic were common at the recent Automation Fair sponsored by Rockwell Automation. My colleague Jane Gerold and I discussed this with several people and reached the conclusion that this wall is coming down. We heard examples of how the two groups would gather at a company meeting and an engineer would mention a problem about an Ethernet switch and an IT person would say “Oh, that’s a setting in the switch. Just do this and you’ll be back up.” These are the crucial conversations that need to occur more often - perhaps just over coffee. This issue of Automation World’s Industrial Ethernet Review looks at network administration for engineers. What we hope to begin is a deeper conversation between the corporate IT world and the manufacturing engineering world. Read more...

»Ethernet Products:

Entry-Level Ethernet Switches - The EDS-408A/405A series of entry-level industrial managed Ethernet switches includes both 8-port models and 5-port models.

These rugged and economical industrial switches feature plug-n-play Turbo Ring redundancy (recovery time < 300 ms at full load) and advanced managed functions, such as QoS, Port-based VLAN, SNMP V1/V2c/V3, and RMON. Additional features that system integrators will find useful include automatic warning via e-mail or relay by user-configured events, and user-friendly Web-based configuration and management. This new generation industrial Ethernet switch also meets the RoHS “green product” standards. Read more...

Ethernet Media Converters - Now available at a reduced cost, the EIMC family is a line of true Ethernet media converters, converting signals between copper and fiber without any Ethernet frame store-and-forward.

Therefore, the data experiences minimal latency. The models support full- or half-duplex mode. The EIMC-10T/F can operate at 10 Mbps and convert 10BASE-T to 10BASE-FL (850 nm) or it can operate at 100 Mbps and convert 100BASE-TX to 100BASE-SX (850 nm). Two models pass 100-Mbps data between 100BASE-TX and 100BASE-FX (1300 nm) multimode segments: the EIMC-100T/FT and the EIMC-100T/FC. The EIMC-100T/FCS is used for 100 Mbps (1300 nm) single-mode networks. The EIMC-100T/FCS is priced at $249; all other models are priced at $199. Read more...

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