The fully managed N-TRON 9000 Series Gigabit Ethernet capable industrial Ethernet switch offers superior performance and ease of use for Ethernet enabled industrial and security equipment. With management features like IGMP Snooping, VLAN, QoS, Port Mirroring, Port Trunking, and, 802.1w Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP), the 9000 Series is designed to increase efficiency in the network performance. All management features can be configured using a Web Browser, Telnet, or COM port. The 9000 Series is an industrial four slot modular switch, offering two optional Gigabit ports, up to sixteen fiber optic ports, and up to twenty-four RJ-45 copper ports. The Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol function allows the switch to be configured in a Ring or Mesh topology, and provides support for redundant path communications with rapid healing. Used as a fiber optic Ring Manager, the 9000 Series switch, with N-TRON’s N-Ring technology, offers expanded ring size capacity, detailed fault diagnostics, and a standard healing time of ˜30ms. For managing, detecting and restoring ring breaks, the N-TRON N-Ring Manager sends out “Self Health” packets and “Ring Control” packets periodically around the fiber optic ring. If these packets are successfully routed around the ring within the allocated time window, the ring is intact. However, if the ring is broken and the Ring Manager stops receiving these health check packets, it times out and converts the ring to a fiber optic backbone within ˜30ms. As a additional diagnostic tool, when using all N-TRON fully managed switches in the ring, a detailed ring map and fault location chart will also be provided on the Ring Manager’s web browser to identify the health status of the ring.