High bandwidth usage, malfunctioning hardware and bottlenecks in a network are the cause of wasted resources in many environments using scada systems today. Adroit has added a simple network management protocol (SNMP) to its supervisory control and data acquisition (scada)/HASP offering to enable its clients to manage the physical network simultaneously to the process network.
Dave Wibberley, managing director of Adroit says, "the integration of the management of physical and process network allows for savings not only through greater efficiencies in terms of monitoring another environment within the same system, but also through quicker, more defined, fault detection and rectification."
The SNMP agent ships standard with Adroit's latest Version 6.0 software, and monitors the network via device specific software which resides on the various workstations, routers, switches and bridges. These agents respond to requests for information with respect to status and allow different levels of control for the specific device. These levels are principally read-only, read-write and triggers traps.
The devices can also be split into a number of objects each with its own object identifier. These different levels form what is known as a management information base (MIB) tree and are housed in a database which records its many attributes. Due to the fact that these attributes are database tables by nature they are then translated via an object browser to be human-readable names.
For example: "1.3.6.1.2.1.1.3" would read as:
"iso.org.dod.internet.mgmt.mib.system.sysuptime"
The security for the system is provided through a system called SNMP Community strings which are passwords to the SNMP information. The security ensures that if access for a particular device is set to Read-Only, that string can only respond to 'Get' and 'GetNext' requests. Read-Write strings can also respond to SNMP 'Set' commands on condition that the correct SNMP Community string is used. For security purposes an 'Authentication Failure' trap can be used to send a message to one of the network management stations to inform them of a failed access attempt.
To enhance security further the SNMP agent is also designed to work in conjunction with firewalls and security policies, where SNMP packets have to be specifically allowed to pass. Simple set up is achieved through the use of the Adroit agents configuration dialogue. Here the scan rate is set and the relevant values are returned to the user.
For more information contact Adroit Technologies, 011 658 8100, [email protected], www.adroit.co.za
| Tel: | +27 11 658 8100 |
| Email: | [email protected] |
| www: | www.adroitscada.com |
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