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This design and implementation guide represents a collaborative development effort from Cisco Systems and Rockwell Automation. It is built on, and adds to, design guidelines from the Cisco Ethernet-to-the-Factory solution and the Rockwell Automation Integrated Architecture™.

Faced with internal pressures to cut costs and external demands for better products and services, manufacturers are realizing the benefits of a converged network, such as the following:

• Greater visibility
• Better data integration
• Shorter lead times
• Increased turnaround
• Reduced costs
• Simplified management

The key targets are industrial automation and control systems, which benefit greatly from the transition to modern networking technologies from the factory-optimized networks typically in use today. New services and streamlined efficiency result when the information contained within these automation and control systems is available and shared throughout the larger enterprise. Access to existing production information is presently gated by disparate, proprietary, and closed systems. Manufacturers and their industrial suppliers are discovering that standard communication and uniform networking of industrial systems is the key to optimized services, greater visibility, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). They are starting to embrace standard information technology, particularly Ethernet and IP, for industrial automation and control environments.

Although most manufacturers recognize that Ethernet and the IP protocol suite will be the de-facto networking standard in manufacturing environments in the near future, only a few have fully adopted standards-based Ethernet network architectures for industrial automation. Much of this resistance can be attributed to the aversion to disrupting existing systems, the accounting realities of fully-depreciated assets, and the general ebb and flow of production investment cycles. Resistance to migration also comes from the market being serviced by small niche vendors with narrowly-designed products or limited support capabilities. As bigger players start to enter the market and create an industry-wide industrial networking standards organization, the market is poised to explode.

Cisco and Rockwell Automation believe standard networking technology offers value inside industrial operations when the technology is part of larger integrated, industrial automation architectures. Cisco calls this the Ethernet-to-the-Factory (EttF) Architecture. Rockwell Automation calls this Integrated Architecture.

The purpose of this architecture is to accelerate the convergence of standard networking technologies with the industrial automation and control environment. This solution architecture and relevant design and implementation guidelines will give customers, partners, and the marketplace the confidence and background necessary to employ EttF. This solution architecture must be tailored to support automation and control systems. By adopting the solution architecture, the manufacturing process will have to operate at higher levels of performance, efficiency, and uptime as under the previous solutions. At the same time, it must also safely and securely integrate these systems into the broader manufacturing environment; only at this point will all the benefits be available to the manufacturing enterprise.