Fast Ring Industrial Network Redundancy

Fast Ring: A Self-Healing Industrial Network Redundancy

Redundancy is crucial for mission-critical applications such as production, automation, and power plants, simply because of the significant cost of downtime. Recovery time is also another extremely important concern, in which more than 10 seconds is considered unacceptable, making the conventional STP/RSTP undesirable for most industrial applications.

CommFront’s Fast-Ring technology, a self-healing redundancy with a super-fast recovery time of less than 15ms, makes its industrial managed switches ideal for most mission-critical applications. In addition, CommFront’s industrial switches are designed for harsh environment factors such as heat, dust, vibrations, and electrical noises, and thus provide simple yet reliable solutions for most industrial applications, including:

M2M
IIoT
Data Acquisition
Mass Transit
Traffic Signals
Surveillance Systems
Energy Plants
Water and Sewage
Factory / Industrial / Building Automation

Comparison

The Fast-Ring redundancy is a proprietary layer 2 protocol used for fast network recovery in the case of a path failure between two points or the network. Compared with other two link backup methods, the Fast-Ring backup provides the fastest network recovery of 15ms and is ideal for mission-critical industrial applications.

Backup Type	Fast Ring	RSTP	STP
Average Recovery Time	<15ms	<10s	>30s

Fast Ring Applications

Unlike most other sophisticated protocols, CommFront’s Fast-Ring protocol provides various types of flexible yet simple topologies such as single-ring and coupling rings, which in turn improve the reliability of the entire network.