Architecture

1 Standalone PAC

2 BMENUA0100 with control port disabled

3 X80 Ethernet RIO drop

4 Ethernet RIO main ring

5 Control network

6 OPC UA clients (SCADA systems)

7 Engineering workstation with dual Ethernet connections

8 Distributed equipment

9 BMENOS0300 switch

10 Dual ring switch (DRS)

11 BMENOS0300 or a BMENOC0301/11 module

Description

This architecture provides high availability of the control network, via redundant connections between OPC UA clients (SCADA systems) and multiple M580 standalone CPUs. This architecture presents a non-isolated flat network, joining together the control network and the Ethernet RIO main ring in a single subnet.

The BMENUA0100 control port is disabled for each standalone PAC. IPv4 Ethernet communication to the BMENUA0100 module is provided over the backplane port.

In configuration 1, upstream communication to the SCADA servers is accomplished via the dual CPU device network ports, using the RSTP redundancy protocol to assign roles to each port to avoid logical Ethernet loops. Downstream connectivity to the Ethernet distributed equipment is provided by the CPU service port.

In configuration 2, upstream connectivity to the SCADA servers is provided by the device network ports of a BMENOS0300 or a BMENOC0301/11 module. The RSTP redundancy protocol is used to assign roles to each port to avoid logical Ethernet loops. Downstream connectivity from the PAC is provided from the CPU device network ports to the X80 Ethernet remote I/O drop. Further downstream connectivity is provide by both the CRA service port and a BMENOS0300 switch (9) to distributed Ethernet equipment.

In this flat network design, all network devices – including the CPU, CRAs and the BMENUA0100 – are NTP clients of an NTP server that resides in the control network. As a result, the CPU time and the BMENUA0100 module time are synchronized.

The BMENUA0100 supports applicative time stamping. In this process, time stamping modules record events in their local buffer. These time stamped events are consumed by the application running in the PAC, which converts the raw record data and stores it in a usable format. The formatted records can then be consumed by a supervisory application, such as a SCADA system.