Industrial Ethernet Switches – Managed and Unmanaged
MES-3980 supports RSTP and can be incorporated as part of a corporate
IT networking infrastructure.
When you need to implement a private subnet, Turbo Ring offers a
simple method of redundancy that the NI managed switch supports.
Figure 2 shows a ring system with the backup path. If any section
between two switches is broken, the ring can recover communication
within 300 ms with the backup path.
Network Management
The MES-3980 provides port trunking, so you can group two or more
ports together for increased bandwidth and a backup communication
path. The managed switch implements the Link Aggregation Control
Protocol (LACP) based on IEEE 802.3ad to provide link aggregation.
It also offers port-based virtual LAN (VLAN) support for creating
independent logical networks across switches or on the same switching
hardware. The MES-3980 implements the Generic Attribute Registration
Protocol (GARP), and, to support VLANs, it uses the GARP VLAN
Registration Protocol (GVRP) based on IEEE 802.1Q. The NI managed
switch, configured for the VLAN in which it is incorporated, uses the
GVRP to spread necessary information and configure other switches
across VLANs.
Network Monitoring and Security
Port mirroring allows one port on a switch to check the traffic sent and
received by another port for network monitoring. With remote monitoring
(RMON) support, network administrators can obtain network-fault
diagnosis, planning, and performance-tuning data from the NI managed
switch. Using these features, the MES-3980 provides a wide range of
industry-standard options for network monitoring.
The MES-3980 uses the Simple Network Management Protocol
(SNMP) so network management systems can access data from the
switch to describe system configuration. Network management systems
use SNMP to monitor devices attached to the network.
The most common concern with Ethernet is security. The NI managed
switch offers MAC filtering control so you can configure a table of
acceptable MAC addresses that the switch uses to filter traffic from
unauthorized devices.
The NI managed switch also supports Port Lock access by MAC
address so that locked ports such as those connected to the external
network are not able to learn other MAC addresses and only pass traffic
sent from preset MAC addresses. This helps to avoid inappropriate port
usage by external devices.
Figure 2. Ring Configuration for Communication Redundancy
Network Redundancy and Industrial
Protocol Support
The MES-3980 supports the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) and
Rapid STP (RSTP) developed by Cisco and now incorporated in the
IEEE 802.1D-2004 standard. In addition to STP and RSTP, the managed
switch works with Turbo Ring technology, which provides ring recovery
time <20 ms for Ethernet redundancy when an Ethernet network is
configured using a ring topology. IT administrators typically use STP
and RSTP to implement redundancy in corporate IT networks. The
NI unmanaged and managed Ethernet switches work with PC-based
Ethernet standards based on the IEEE 802.3 application and transport
layers of the TCP/IP protocols. Both the UES-3880 and MES-3980 are
compatible with NI shared variables and industrial protocols that rely
on TCP/IP protocols, including Modbus TCP/IP, UDP, and TCP.
Additional industrial protocols, including Ethernet/IP and PROFINET,
add more requirements to the transport layers of TCP/IP and are
supported only by the MES-3980. The NI managed switch offers Internet
Group Management Protocol (IGMP) snooping and supports the GARP
Multicast Registration Protocol (GMRP) that allows the managed switch
to filter multicast traffic such as traffic generated from Ethernet/IP
networks. For applications involving NI Ethernet-based hardware on a
network with PROFINET I/O, the MES-3980 provides packet prioritization
based on the Quality of Service (QoS) IEEE 802.1p/1Q standard that
defines priority levels for individual packets routed on a network.
System Notification and
Backup Configuration
The NI managed switch offers several features for power failure and port
break detection. For system management, the MES-3980 delivers
configurable e-mail notifications when an exception is detected,
providing system managers with real-time alarm messages. For local
alarms and notifications, the MES-3980 offers two relay contacts with a
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