Cisco became the first major switch vendor to release a TSN (Time Sensitive Networking) product for the industrial market earlier this year. TTTech, a global leader in the field of robust networking and safety controls, strongly supported the deployment of TSN in Cisco’s IE4000 switch. This project was part of a long-standing cooperation with Cisco which has included technology development and collaboration in the IEEE TSN standardization group.
The standard version of Cisco’s IE4000 is a 20 port Gigabit Ethernet switch designed for industrial and ruggedized applications. In developing the TSN enhancement for the IE4000, Cisco looked to TTTech for their wide-ranging expertise in implementing TSN mechanisms in hardware and software. Cisco enhanced the IE4000 with time sensitive capabilities by leveraging TTTech’s IP implementation and scheduling know how, thus reducing internal development efforts for Cisco and gaining a vital time-to-market advantage.
“Cisco’s collaboration with TTTech allows us to deliver a standards-based solution around Time Sensitive Networking to guarantee delivery of critical control application traffic over Ethernet with consistent latency. Together with our growing ecosystem of TSN compliant product vendors we help our customers achieve their Industrie 4.0 objectives, with a lower total cost of ownership on one, secure network, from the factory floor to the enterprise,” explains Vikas Butaney, Vice President Industrial IoT Networking.
“The partnership between Cisco and TTTech has helped position both companies at the forefront of the TSN Ethernet revolution,” says Wolfgang Leindecker, Vice President Sales & Marketing Industrial at TTTech. “Customers are now benefitting from access to high quality products that enable a single Ethernet network that works across vendors and drives IT and OT convergence through common management practices.”
Cisco recognized the value of TTTech’s experience with real-time systems and the scheduling of Ethernet networks. Accordingly, Cisco and TTTech have been working together to integrate TTTech’s powerful network scheduling engine into Cisco’s configuration management platform. Starting with IOS s/w release version 15.2(5)E2, Cisco customers will be able to take full advantage of TSN scheduling and configuration.
Cisco’s IE4000 switch supporting TSN can be seen as part of the IIC TSN testbed demo on the TTTech booth (6-460) at SPS-IPC Drives fair in Nuremberg from the 28th to 30th November 2017.
