S-Ring

S-Ring™ (patent pending) Redundancy Manager software product, built upon networking industry standards including IEEE 802.1w Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP) and 802.1d Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), enables 6K Managed Switches to simplify and speed up recovery from faults in Industrial Ethernet LAN configurations that use a ring structure. With S-Ring, fault tolerant LANs finally can have both standards and speed.

The S-Ring product supports multi-vendor Ethernet switches and hubs in the rings. While fault recovery times will vary with the particular ring topology and ring member devices selected, almost any ring using standard Ethernet products will experience recovery speed improvements over STP using S-Ring. In addition, S-Ring makes Ethernet ring-topology LANs more reliable because fault recovery is less complex and much faster.

Industrial LANs often extend over great distances using fibre media, and a ring structure provides fault tolerance at low cost because it minimizes cabling expenses. The number of ring members or “drops” may be 10 or 20, even 50 or more in some cases such as in energy and transportation systems. Pipelines, railroads, windmill farms, oil and gas producing fields, waterways and canals, tunnels, highways and city traffic control systems are all good examples of redundant ring applications covering large areas and long distances. Other industrial facilities that benefit from large rings include water treatment plants, mines and quarries, forest product mills, agricultural buildings, and warehouses. With S-Ring, fault recovery speed is as fast for large rings as it is for small rings.

S-Ring software operates in a 6K Switch from specifically defined port pairs that have ring-topology Ethernet devices attached. It builds upon the foundations of RSTP and STP, but offers an additional option related specifically to ring topologies. SRing acts to recover the ring traffic from faults at sub-second speed, over-riding the Spanning Tree analysis delay but without conflicting with the standard. The user configures and controls the S-Ring setup as part of the 6K Switch’s software, MNS-6K. A Ring-Scan feature simplifies ring definitions and makes reliable installation easy.