Networking success for Hirschmannn's Mission Critical Network Design Seminar

Attendance at Hirschmann’s first Australian Mission Critical Network Design Seminar on the Gold Coast has well exceeded expectations, according to Keith Mauck, Vice President, Sales & Marketing, Asia Pacific, Belden. The seminar promised to provide the 55 participants with the benefit of the presenters’ 150 years of combined experience as they spoke on network technology topics ranging from network security to wireless best practices and implementing redundancy, to name a few.

“I’m very happy that the number of people we have here has exceeded our expectations by a significant amount,” said Mauck. “I’d only planned to do an event like this every other year in Australia, but with the feedback we have had it appears a conference like this could be sustained every year.

“It was important to bring in the technical experts from Germany and the Competency Center in Singapore as we have, which shows the depth of technical expertise within the company, and to deliver the value that people are paying for without making it a ‘product-pushing’ seminar.”

Mauck pointed out that the event is not a promotional exercise where sales people are constantly extolling the virtues of Belden and Hirschmann products. “The focus is on the technology. We are trying to help our customers manage their networks better and we believe we have some unique solutions that enable them to do just that. Our message here is not the brand, it’s about how to do things the right way.”

Networking about networking

As one of the participants I was able to refresh my knowledge in the areas of industrial ethernet, wireless and network security by attending some of the 14 different technical sessions and six hands-on lab sessions.

Keynote presentations were given by Yokogawa, who spoke about their network security initiatives; Queensland Nickel, who described their DCS network upgrade; and RMIT University, who described the latest in their technical education and training offerings, with new courses in industrial networking supported by Belden, which has supplied lab training equipment.

Subject areas and hand-on sessions covered the following important areas:

• Cabling
• Network design and VLANs
• Wireless networking and best practice
• Network redundancy
• Network management
• IEC 61850 substation networking
• Network security

Most of these sessions presented information from the top down, showing various implementation options and discussing when different technology approaches are appropriate and inappropriate.

Figure 1: Delegates enjoyed in-depth hands-on training sessions covering various technologies.

A good example was the ‘Wireless Best Practise’ presentation, given by Mark Cooksley, Product Manager for security and network management solutions. It covered basic components, ISM frequency bands, wireless standards, channel selection, access methods, antenna technology, RF issues (such as reflection, diffraction, absorption), topologies (spanning tree versus mesh), and security (encryption methods WEP, WPA and WPA2). The delegates found this to be an hour and a half that was well spent.

Customer perspective

The Belden executives, technical experts and business managers were pleased with the Australian Hirschmann Mission Critical Network Design Seminar. But how about the participants? Speaking to various delegates at the evening social events, I found that people were suitably impressed with the quality of the sessions and the information provided and were very happy to get some hands-on training to update their knowledge of industrial networking.

I spent some time discussing this with one of the keynote presenters, and he discussed the way he and his colleagues have been using Hirschmann technology in their plant. Luton Semple is a process control engineer from Queensland Nickel (QN) near Townsville. QN’s Yabulu Refinery processes nickel and cobalt-bearing ores purchased from mines in New Caledonia, Indonesia and the Philippines, and sells refined nickel and cobalt product to the world market. Luton presented a keynote address at the conference, highlighting the work that QN has been doing in upgrading their industrial ethernet infrastructure.

Figure 2: Luton Semple, Queensland Nickel, and Keith Mauk of Belden.

Luton has been working on upgrades of the ABB 800xA DCS systems at the plant over the past year, involving the migration of four separate systems into one. This also involved moving the related computer systems out of the process areas of the plant and into a central server room shared with the IT department, providing a better standard of cooling and UPS, as well as a more consistently clean environment.

In order to migrate 54 physical servers with 16 networks (four networks for each of four legacy DCS systems) into the two racks supplied in the server room, it was necessary to consolidate down to four networks and virtualise the servers. Using the VLAN functionality in Hirschmann’s ethernet switches allowed the four physical networks to be divided into the existing networks in the process areas. Using untagged VLANs allowed the four sets of DCS process networks to remain unchanged, simplifying the migration, while still limiting multicast traffic and providing separation between the four areas.

“A lot of the work around the project has been to do with getting that architecture right and also getting our underlying DCS software libraries standardised, the goal being to provide a consolidated system that is still manageable with the operator and engineer site knowledge that exists today,” said Semple.

“We had Hirschmann to help us during the proof-of-concept phase, while ABB worked with us for the actual architecture rollout,” he said. “ABB is a Hirschmann partner and is our automation partner for the site, and so being a partner it was easy for them to help us with the network. We also are lucky to have staff with good networking knowledge on-site.”

Luton said that in speaking with other customers at the conference he saw that most of them are facing similar networking hurdles. The use of IP cameras and the need for better integration with business systems are placing demands on plant networks across the board.

“People are asking, ‘If I can see that (data) on the operator screens, why can’t I also see it on my business desktop?’ And really, there is no reason why we can’t do that, but it’s a new challenge and we have to provide that higher level of security,” said Semple.

Coming to the conference has given Semple ideas about how QN can improve their network architecture further.

“A lot of the content - the bones of it - we are already doing. But to hear the experts speak about best practice has given us better ideas for how to use some of the features of the switches to give us better control and security,” he said. “For example, with our VLANs we don’t have full visibility down to the bottom layer of the plant from the top, which makes the network management a little more difficult, so the sessions here have shown me how we can better use the switch features to extend the network management through the network.”

Glenn Johnson, Editor