|
contents | technologies | |||||||
| Contemporary Controls' Three New Managed Features for Networks Contemporary Controls offers three new managed features to safeguard against risks to your control networks. After discussion with the company's customers, engineers designed three new features associated with their EISX_M, EICP_M, and EISB_M managed switches. These features are rate limiting, port locking and overlapping VLANs in order to prevent any risks when interconnecting office and factory networks. The first feature is rate limiting. Rate limiting lets the individual select a maximum traffic level (from 64 kB to 100 Mbps) so normal communications would operate properly, even allowing the control network to function in the event that the office network has a catastrophic problem. One related feature of rate limiting is broadcast storm control which the company's switches also support. The second feature is port locking. This is another method of controlling the traffic that comes through the office network. Port locking limits what devices can communicate through a specific port of the switch. The third feature is known as overlapping VLANs. It enables a few devices to be shared between the office and the control network. Meaning, the office traffic from the portion of the control network is eliminated that does not need to communicate with the office network. If a SCADA system needs to communicate with both the office network and the control network, an "overlapping VLAN" could be used to keep office traffic from all control devices except for the SCADA system. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Networking News :: home page |