Intelligent Industrial Ethernet Switch with Fibre Ring Function
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Black Box Network Services
Ring Configuration
The configuration of the operating mode for the ring application is done with the
network management.
At the menu point Hardware Setting it is possible to select the two modes master or
slave. The switch which is configured in master mode is doing the ring manager
functions to avoid the multiplication of the data.
If one connection or one device fails this information is forwarded to the ring manager
(master) by a special protocol. The ring manager keeps the operation of the complete
segment up.
Advantage of this solution is that the ring manager itself has not to be redundant,
because if the manager fails the data can not be multiplied. The segments stays under
operation.
To avoid that the signalling in case of failure has no affect on other rings, it is possible
to define different rings with numbers from 0 to 255 by the network management.
All switches with ring functionality are having the management features included and
are offering the detection and signalling of any failure.
With this concept a limitation in regards to the maximum ring length is not given.