In a typical fiber installation, laying extra fiber cores as spares is an industry practice. Whenever there is any failure, these spares can be swapped over to form the new ring instead of having to lay new replacement cables. Since these spare cores are already available, wouldn’t it be great if they can be providing a automatic backup ring.

As the Automation world and IT world converges, the use of Ethernet for visualization, data logging and alarm monitoring has increased significantly.

The Ethernet topology deployed started with simple point to point and star topology using unmanaged switches. With the growing demand for redundancy and reduction in fiber cable and managed switches cost, the use of ring topology is now becoming the norm.

In a typical fiber installation, laying extra fiber cores as spares is an industry practice. Whenever there is any failure, these spares can be swapped over to form the new ring instead of having to lay new replacement cables.

Since these spare cores are already available, wouldn’t it be great if they can be plugged into the same set of switches providing a automatic backup ring rather than hanging there waiting to be switched over manually in the event of failure in the cable? Now three failures in the cable can be tolerated instead of one with a switch over time of less than 15ms compared to the hours lost to manually swap them over at each remote location.

Being plugged in, the health of these spare cores is also monitored. Imagine the shock when you swap the spare cores and find them to be faulty too.

Phoenix Contact range of  FactoryLine 3000/4000 series range of managed switches allows you to do just that , dual ring with single set of hardware (See picture 1).

The configuration of the dual ring function is web based, simple and intuitive. You will only need to enable the ring state and redundant ring state as well as defining the port involved in the ring (See picture 2)

Rather than letting your spare cables hanging and taking a risk; assuming that they are in good working condition, why not connect them to Phoenix Contact managed switches and reap benefits from them!

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Want to find out more? Feel free to contact us at marketing@phoenixcontact.com.sg!