Local manufacturing organisations are evolving into new business entities, capable of meeting their competitors on the world stage in terms of operational efficiency and product quality. The local manufacturing arena is using cutting-edge information technology because a large amount of information needs to be processed for manufacturing operations to run smoothly.
Networking requirements for South African manufacturing companies are going through a dramatic change. The various forms of manufacturing operational information can have different characteristics and the ability to prioritise the underlying data traffic over the corporate network has taken on a new significance.
This is the view of Martin May, regional director (sub-Saharan Africa) of Enterasys Networks. He says many manufacturing companies are employing advanced control systems for the first time, following increasing demands for quality and cost metrics from within their organisations.
"Often control systems do not have large data capacity requirements, but they often have real-time characteristics that dictate prioritisation of information being sent to them via a network," he says.
"For example, many manufacturing companies are using sensors to automatically capture a wide range of information. This can include dimensional, contact or visual inspection, temperature or pressure information.
"Sensor information has a significant amount of real-time emphasis, and latency may be important," says May.
"This is equally true of enterprise management applications which are typically client-server and need to have an underlying network to make them `quasi-real-time` so information can be captured quickly and easily." May says the Internet, as well as corporate intranets and extranets have become key communication tools for many manufacturing companies. Because of the diversity of information accessed through these networks, prioritisation of data traffic along with other applications will increasingly be critical to their successful use. Bandwidth, latency, and security are also significant issues.
"Additionally," he says "prioritisation is also a key to successful implementation of a convergence programme, such as the convergence of voice, video and data transmitted through a digital network.
"Finally, there is a major move to concurrent engineering where many groups in a manufacturing enterprise are involved in the up-front design and engineering phase of product development. This is leading to a dramatic growth in various forms of videoconferencing.
"The ability for people to see and hear each other in real time is accepted as beneficial to a successful team approach to building product."
May says other examples of the need for application-aware networks, include document sharing, computer modelling, finite element analysis (FEA), kinematic analysis, flow analysis, electrical loading, thermal analysis, power consumption and other applications.
"In the manufacturing environment, virtually every person, machine, control, and sensor associated with bringing products to customers must be networked together to meet the quality, time-to-market and operational efficiency goals demanded of today`s production managers.
"For all these diverse applications to run on top of a common networking infrastructure means the underlying networking equipment must be capable of prioritising the transmission of information based on the application involved.
"In addition to the ability to prioritise traffic by applications, a critical feature to look for in a networking platform is how the prioritisation is accomplished."
May maintains most network platforms, based on conventional network switches/routers, are only able to perform `strict prioritisation`, that is they will always forward the highest priority data packet. However, there are circumstances where one application needlessly interferes with another, particularly if the network managers don`t finely tune the priorities.
In many situations a `weighted fair queuing` prioritisation methodology would perform a better job of providing the balance network users want.
"Users looking to implement application-aware networking solutions, should look for a switched network platform that implements Layer-4 switching technology.
Dubbed `intelligent switches`, Layer-4 switches incorporate a form of traffic prioritisation that includes strict and weighted fair queuing methodologies.
"These switches have the intelligence to recognise an application and can do an excellent job of prioritising that application`s traffic to best serve end users` needs. The support of Layer-4 in a networking device is new, and it is a powerful feature. It permits the end-to-end prioritisation of network traffic that is particularly critical in a modern manufacturing organisation.
"Application-aware switch routing implementations have brought Layer-4 technology to the forefront of the networking industry, and should be seriously evaluated by any manufacturing enterprise investing in networking technology to take them into the future," May adds.
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