IF YOU THOUGHT REDUNDANCY WAS AN UNAFFORDABLE LUXURY, AN INNOVATIVE NEW TECHNOLOGY IS BRINGING THE BENEFITS OF DUAL HOMING REDUNDANCY TECHNOLOGY TO MAINSTREAM CONTROL APPLICATIONS, WITHOUT THE ASSOCIATED COST, DAVID MOSS OF GARRETTCOM EUROPE EXPLAINS. Effective redundancy strategies have always been of prime importance in critical applications where a fault or failure could result in catastrophe. But today, even in more standard industrial applications, the simple financial costs associated with unexpected downtime are leading increasing numbers of manufacturers to look at introducing redundant systems to deliver the high availability needed to ensure profitability. Designing and implementing high availability industrial networks has traditionally represented something of a challenge. The many popular serial fieldbuses do not typically offer fault-tolerant options, making the choices for redundancy on the plant floor limited, expensive and complicated. The move to Ethernet as the backbone for industrial automation networks has seen the increasing use of ring and mesh topologies for connectivity. These topologies ensure that a break in the media doesn't bring down the whole network, but a fault in an individual switch can still cause problems. True, the individual. switch can be bypassed by network traffic, but any devices and -nodes connected to that faulty switch are effectively isolated.
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