Automation is becoming more and more prevalent in today’s industrial and utility environments, mostly due to plants moving away from serial and point to point connections between devices and instead changing over to Ethernet. Due to the open standards in Ethernet, vendors of IEDs and RTUs are starting to include Ethernet interfaces in all their newer devices, but what about the older legacy devices currently in play? Due to the cost involved in upgrading a whole site to Ethernet, it can become unfeasible to do the upgrade all at once, however when upgrading over time care must be taken to maintain communications between different vendors devices.
The new FEP (Front End Processor) and SCS (Substations Communications Server) from RuggedCom are designed to reduce the impact to a site caused by the upgrading of their end devices. These devices have a direct connection to the end devices, and provide protocol conversion allowing multiple different vendors devices to still communicate amongst each other.
With support for currently over 40 protocols, and more in the works, the RuggedCom FEP or SCS are invaluable when multiple devices using different protocols need to still communicate amongst themselves. Contact H3iSquared for more information on the RuggedCom solutions available.
H3iSquared Trading
Tel: +27 (0)11 454 6025
Email: info@h3isquared.com