TECH TALK

A journal of bus architecture tips & techniques

New Turbo Ring Technology
The world's fastest redundant Ethernet ring

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 the world's fastest 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 offers users a 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
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. In addition, the new generation Turbo Ring does not require a control line, which for many applications results in a significantly lower cost.

Ring Coupling Example

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 (e.g., Ring B in the figure at the right) only needs 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-Homing Example

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. Different automation applications require different levels of redundancy. Turbo Ring provides media redundancy, and only Turbo Ring's fast 20 ms recovery time is sufficient for many critical automation systems (compared with Spanning Tree Protocol which has a recovery time of several seconds).

Dual-Ring Example

Note that all of MOXA's managed switches (except the EDS-726) will support the new generation Turbo Ring. In addition, 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 the world's fastest redundant and most reliable ring solution, but with the flexibility you need to deploy sophisticated, cross-vendor networks.  For further information on Turbo Ring and Moxa's line of industrial Ethernet switches, click here.

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