GarrettCom Extends Industrial Network Redundancy Options

GarrettCom, Inc. has announced Release 4.1 of the Magnum MNS-6K (Managed Network Software) for managed switches and Release 14.1 of MNS-6K-SECURE, a version of MNS-6K with extended security features. In these new releases, GarrettCom implements the IEEE 802.1D-2004 standard for Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP) and Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), a higher-speed implementation that can also support larger ring and mesh networks.

GarrettCom offers a full range of redundancy solutions in its "Redundancy with Standards for Industrial Networking" program. The program is aimed at making it easy for industrial network designers to achieve the failure recovery time they need, cost-effectively and with the security of standards-based future-safe designs.

GarrettCom leads offers a range of choices for redundant and reliable LAN and WAN networks including:

• Software-based standard RSTP solutions for managed network structures, including both routers and switches
• Software-based standard STP solutions for use with legacy LAN hubs and switches
• Standards-based proprietary solutions, such as S-Ring that allows for fast recovery in rings comprising both managed and unmanaged switches for a lower cost redundancy solution
• Link-Loss-Learn recovery feature for managed and unmanaged edge switches
• Hardware-based Dual-Homing Edge Switches for high-availability edge devices.

GarrettCom's RSTP implementation in Release 4.1 offers outstanding performance: GarrettCom has tested rings from as few as 20 to more than 100 switches and routers, and achieved fault recovery times averaging roughly two milliseconds per hop. It is backward-compatible with all redundancy solutions currently available from GarrettCom and interoperable with other switches using industry-standard RSTP technology.