I'm just a tech and pretty rusty on my ethernet theory from college (many years ago) so bear with me.
In a medium-sized food processing plant. With new projects and upgrades we've been shifting more towards ethernet-based communication between devices (VFDs and servos in particular). This is replacing some Devicenet control networks and hard-wired controls.
We're just trying to set up some long-term plan for organizing our IP addresses.
How are you guys handling IP address overloading of networks?
Our current network setup is a dedicated "business" network and a dedicated "process" network.
Our process network is rapidly running out of IP address for equipment without going to subnets or secondary networks.
One situation in particular:
One new piece of equipment has 1 PLC, 1 HMI, and 5 servo drives on a machine-local network. We could just re-address the devices on the machine network to to fit in with our process network scheme but that would take 7 addresses in place of 1 on the machine it replaced. Not what we're looking for since there are multiple machines that will be recieving similar upgrades as we progress.
Currently, the machine networks are isolated from the process network but we would like to incorporate them for data acquisition and troubleshooting.
Ideally, we'd like to keep the machine-local network as built and jump across a gateway/switch to be able to access all devices on the machine-local network.
What is available to allow this?
I'm thinking a Spectrum Webport or similar?
Allen-Bradley Control/CompactLogix and SLC PLCs, PV+ HMIs, Kinetix servo drives, PF525 and PF755 VFDs are the main ethernet-based devices we're incorporating right now.
Any tips would be appreciated.
In a medium-sized food processing plant. With new projects and upgrades we've been shifting more towards ethernet-based communication between devices (VFDs and servos in particular). This is replacing some Devicenet control networks and hard-wired controls.
We're just trying to set up some long-term plan for organizing our IP addresses.
How are you guys handling IP address overloading of networks?
Our current network setup is a dedicated "business" network and a dedicated "process" network.
Our process network is rapidly running out of IP address for equipment without going to subnets or secondary networks.
One situation in particular:
One new piece of equipment has 1 PLC, 1 HMI, and 5 servo drives on a machine-local network. We could just re-address the devices on the machine network to to fit in with our process network scheme but that would take 7 addresses in place of 1 on the machine it replaced. Not what we're looking for since there are multiple machines that will be recieving similar upgrades as we progress.
Currently, the machine networks are isolated from the process network but we would like to incorporate them for data acquisition and troubleshooting.
Ideally, we'd like to keep the machine-local network as built and jump across a gateway/switch to be able to access all devices on the machine-local network.
What is available to allow this?
I'm thinking a Spectrum Webport or similar?
Allen-Bradley Control/CompactLogix and SLC PLCs, PV+ HMIs, Kinetix servo drives, PF525 and PF755 VFDs are the main ethernet-based devices we're incorporating right now.
Any tips would be appreciated.