Industrial ethernet switches

One of the most important feature which has influence on operational reliability of switches is possibility to create safe reduntant network. This kind of connection guarantee comunication even if one chain become broken. There is to ways to create such a safe, reduntant connection.

Trunking (Link aggregation) is an inexpensive way to set up a high-speed backbone network that transfers much more data than any one single port or device can deliver. Although in the past various vendors used proprietary techniques, the preference today is to use the IEEE standard Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP). This allows several devices to communicate simultaneously at their full single-port speed while not allowing any one single device to monopolize all available backbone capacity.

Ring Topology - this type of a redundant ring configuration, recovery times may be around 100ms per switch. For example, with six managed switches in a ring topology, the recovery time should be less than 500ms. Unfortunately, since a redundant topology requires the use of multiple managed switches, this configuration is usually cost prohibitive.