In the past two decades, Ethernet-based networks were adopted as the backbone of industrial automation. The latest trend in industrial automation is ‘Industry 4.0’ which originated by the German government to create the ‘Smart Factory’ based on the concept of computerized manufacturing. The smart factory requires the use of more than a billion connected devices which raise a lot of concern about the reliability and the security of network communications for all kinds of applications in the industry. Unreliable networks almost always lead to delays in production. This is no longer acceptable in the Industry 4.0 era where competition in business is very intense.

In order to minimize such unexpected downtimes and provide reliable connections, Mencom now offers a wide range of industrial Ethernet switches such as Managed Switches, Unmanaged Switches, Gigabit Switches, Harsh Environment Switches, and EN50155 Certified Switches. They also offer Secure Routers, Media converters, Serial Device Servers, Modbus Gateways and Power supplies.

Mencom networking solutions provide prolonged Mean-Time-Between-Failure (MTBF) so that in an event of link or device failure, Smart-Redundancy features will detect the failure, relay the cause of the failure back to the control center, and automatically recover from such failure to provide continuous operation.

They are also designed with embedded isolation to withstand the harshest industrial-grade electromagnetic interference and susceptibility without suffering fatal damage or generating noise. In addition, Ethernet Ring Protection Switching (ERPS), Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP), or Media Redundancy Protocol (MRP) ring settings can resume the operation and network connectivity immediately if a network switch fails or a communication link is broken.

For security and encryption, Mencom’s networking devices provide seamless and cost-effective encrypted links for local area networks (LANs) through MACsec (IEEE Medium Access Control Security Standard, IEEE 802.1AE) and for wide area networks (WANs) or Internet through IPsec (Internet Protocol Security) or OpenVPN.