Technology is constantly expanding to bring automation and increased efficiency to more areas of a business all the time. In industrial sectors, networking equipment, which was previously thought of for the data center and wiring closet only, is moving into areas like power substations and factory floors.
The rise of specially designed industrial networking products (local area network switches, routers, and wireless products) means the network can now expand into harsh and remote environments and withstand extreme temperatures, vibration, dust, and other rugged conditions. Regular commercial-grade switches and routers can only function in climate-controlled data centers and wiring closets and are very sensitive to extreme temperatures or humidity. This new breed of industrial-grade networking products plays a key role in environments like power and energy, wind farms, military, water treatment, and maritime. The Smart Grid in particular has become a key application for industrial networking products. According to ARC Advisory Group, the industrial Ethernet market is growing at a rate of about 30 percent per year, and is projected to reach $955 million in 2011.
With industrial networking, power and cooling equipment can be connected directly to a network, rather than being monitored “in person” by someone walking through a facility. This level of automation helps to increase efficiency and reduce the chance of human error. And, the data gathered from a network-connected device can provide important information to help identify trends in power usage (or output) and “on-off” status (see figure 1). This can be monitored on a 24x7 basis through either a local area network (LAN) or from a long distance via a wide area network (WAN) with usage data captured on a continuous basis.
There are many benefits to having these data. Power use can be analyzed to determine peak (and off-peak) times and identify and eliminate energy waste, reducing overall energy consumption, and controlling costs. The data can be used for proactive capacity planning and can help determine the amount of back-up power (battery and/or generators) needed in a given environment.
In addition to data collection, facilities managers and network administrators can be automatically alerted to hardware or performance changes in (network-connected) power and cooling equipment early on to help prevent outages or downtime. Additionally, network devices can be monitored to track key hardware criteria such as temperature and the status of fans, power supplies. and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), and an alert or warning can be sent when a critical threshold level is approached or passed. The key to keeping up with these changes is monitoring and managing the network.
Today, a variety of network management tools are available to continually monitor the status of devices connected to a network, as well as the connections between devices and any changes that are made in the infrastructure. These network management tools, which are software based, can quickly discover all devices in a network and build a topological map showing devices and connections. This type of dynamic discovery and mapping is important in environments where changes are constantly being made, such as devices being added or removed from the network and/or changes in the network configuration (see figure 2).
However, the market includes a wide range of network management software products. When evaluating network management tools, there are a few things to look for and consider: