Moxa Turbo Chain

January 2010 IT in Manufacturing

Enable multiple redundant networks flexibly and reliably.

At this year´s SPS/IPC/Drives show in Nuremberg, Moxa presented its new redundancy solution for Industrial Ethernet networks – Turbo Chain.

Turbo Chain is a layer 2 protocol that provides recovery of the network communication in case of a single switch failure or a single link failure between switches. Recovery time is less than 20 milliseconds (with up to 250 switches in one chain) are in a system that offers flexible network topologies and co-works with RSTP.

The Turbo Chain concept

A linear network of switches, a so-called chain, contains a head switch and a tail switch. Each end switch on the chain connects to another network. When all links in the chain are operational, the tail switch blocks the port connected to the other network.

In case of inter-switch link failure, the nodes adjacent to the failed link block the affected ports and report the failure to the chain. The tail switch port then transitions from blocked to forwarding to keep the network communication available.

Inter-switch link recovery works as follows: when the failed link recovers, the connected ports of the adjacent nodes keep blocking traffic. The adjacent nodes report the link recovery to the chain. Then the tail port transitions to blocked state and notifies the adjacent nodes to transition their ports to forwarding again.

The main benefits of Turbo Chain are the high availability through a fast recovery time and the flexibility of the possible network topologies. In addition, the standard interoperability approach protects existing investments. Sub-system expansion becomes easy and reduces installation costs while increasing redundancy without any network modification. Turbo chain also provides a scalable solution for I/O device redundancy as it eliminates switch single point of failure, increases I/O device network redundancy, reduces cabling costs and offers a unified device switch design.

Moxa Turbo Pack

Moxa has packed Turbo Chain redundancy along managed Ethernet switch functions and new Ethernet protocols into a new firmware called Turbo Pack with which customers can directly upgrade the firmware into existing switches without any hardware modification. Turbo Pack offers LLDP technology, allows flexible network topologies, time synchronisation (IEEE 1588), easy network extensions, DHCP Opt 82, standard interoperability and fast recovery times.

The main benefits of Turbo Pack are:

* Redundant network:

1. Moxa Turbo Ring protocol with <20 ms recovery time.

2. STP/RSTP

3. Port trunking

4. Turbo Chain

* Reliable management:

1. HTTPS/SSL

2. IEEE 802.1X

3. Port lock

4. SNMP Inform

5. SSH

* Optimised performance:

1. IPv6 (& IPv4 = dual stack)

2. QoS

3. Rate limiting

4. VLAN

5. IGMP snooping

6. DHCP option 82

7. IEEE 1588 PTP

8. Modbus/TCP

9. SSH

10. Firefox Web browser

* Easy maintenance:

1. SNMP

2. RMON

3. Auto e-mail warning

4. LLDP

5. User friendly GUI

Moxa Turbo Chain and Turbo Pack are ideal for large network deployments and applications that require numerous rings and network extensions, including: intelligent transportation systems; railway infrastructure; power distribution; factory automation; power plants; telecommunications and robotic control.

Credit(s)

RJ Connect

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