A high-speed railway operator built a fibre Ethernet backbone for data transmission between its operational management centre and railway stations to ensure high network availability. The customer used around 30 Moxa industrial rackmount switches (IKS-G6524) to connect to the existing Layer 3 networks. The customer also required industrial network management software to use throughout the network management lifecycle for installation, operation, maintenance, and diagnostics. The software had to be usable on mobile devices as the railway operator’s network administrators need to leave the control room to patrol within and around the stations.
MXstudio is Moxa’s industrial network management tool that can be used to monitor and manage industrial networks. Part of this solution is MXconfig, which the rail operator was able to utilise when performing the initial mass deployment. Instead of manually configuring the MAC address and assigning IP addresses one by one, the operator was able to use MXconfig to configure the IP address, VLAN, and redundancy protocols for a batch of switches simultaneously. MXConfig’s Link Sequence Detection function makes mass configuration easy by using the physical proximity of each switch to the computer to assign IP addresses. In this way, it is easy to tell which switch belongs to which station, which reduces the amount of time engineers need to spend configuring switches.
The use of effective network management applications can help network administrators accomplish tasks efficiently during different stages of the network management lifecycle. As business environments continue to evolve and improvements are made to mobile device technology, a mobile app that supports network monitoring allows administrators to be efficient, effective, and responsive when monitoring and maintaining an industrial network.
By using the MXview ToGo app, administrators can view the status of the network and each device as well as receive real-time alerts on their mobile devices. In addition to mobile monitoring, MXview ToGo also supports smart device search and an identification function. When in the field, automation engineers can view detailed device information and can find a specific device among the racks quickly, which shortens the amount of time required to perform maintenance as well as minimise downtime.
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