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Industrial 8-port Ethernet Switches Feature Redundant Ring Technology for High Reliability

Wixom, MI: Acromag announced their EIS Series of industrial Ethernet 8-port switches. The top of the line EIS-408 model is web-managed and provides six 10/100Base-TX copper ports and two 100Base-FX fiber ports. On the unmanaged EIS-308, all eight ports are 10/100 copper. Both models feature self-healing redundant ring technology for high reliability. An economical unmanaged switch without redundancy, the EIS-308, is also available. All models include auto MDI / MDI-X crossover and auto-polarity; IEEE 802.3 and 802.3u compliance, IEEE 802.3x flow control on full-duplex, and back pressure on half-duplex. A rugged IP30 aluminum enclosure resists shock, vibration, and free-fall impacts. Other industrial-grade specs include -10 to 70°C operation, 1200V AC port-to-port isolation, redundant DC power inputs, and built-in RFI/EMI and surge/transient protection.

Redundant ring technology  provides a self-recovery mechanism in the event of a communication failure to ensure non-stop system operation. If any segment of the primary communication path is broken or disconnected, the switch will self-reconfigure and provide a redundant path in the network. With ultra-fast recovery time (less than 300ms), you won't even notice a network failure as mission-critical applications are protected from any network interruptions or temporary malfunctions.

A built-in alarm relay contact on EIS-358 and EIS-408 models trips on detection of power or media failures. This relay output can trigger a warning system and quickly inform engineers of the problem.

The flagship EIS-408 is a web-managed industrial switch supporting many powerful features such as port VLAN, Quality of Service (QoS), and Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) Snooping. In addition to six copper ports, the EIS-408 has two fiber optic ports for extending communication distance to 2,000 meters (multi-mode) or 30 km (single-mode).

Advanced features on the EIS-408 perform many network management functions. The EIS-408 supports Quality of Service (QoS) which classifies the importance of each packet and prioritizes the tasks. Ethernet packets, such as control messages, are handled first followed by lower priority packets such as collected data. QoS provides an ideal solution for real-time systems. With the port-based VLAN function, devices are put into logical subgroups within a local area network regardless of the physical LAN segment they are on. Devices from a different VLAN cannot communicate or access your LAN, providing extra security to the entire network. VLAN functions can also restrain the traffic within a VLAN to improve network performance in a large scale. IGMP Snooping can manage multicasting traffic in a switched network. By filtering the multicasting traffic and sorting it to the corresponding group of devices, the EIS-408 forwards messages only to the devices that are interested in the messages. This will reduce the total amount of traffic on the entire network substantially.

Contact:

Robert Greenfield,

Acromag, Incorporated

30765 S Wixom Rd, PO Box 437,

Wixom, MI 48393-7037 USA

Tel: 248-624-1541

Fax: 248-624-9234

E-mail: rgreenfield@acromag.com