My Legacy Master Doesn't Have Enough Ports, and Polling is Slow and Unreliable

A Legacy Master With Insufficient Ports Hurts Network Visibility

Does your current master have enough I/O ports? Most legacy gear doesn't. Equipment built in the 1980s and 1990s simply wasn't designed for the hugely expanded networks of the 21st century.

Many network managers try to make the best use of their limited number of ports by bridging several polling legs onto one port. But this causes a new set of problems:

Polling is slow, and you can't see your alarms as they happen. Bridging too many polling legs creates one huge polling leg, in which every RTU on the port must be polled in turn. Polling the entire network this way can take several minutes. If an alarm event happens at a remote site immediately after a poll, it will be several minutes before you even know about it.
Polling is unreliable. Since all the RTUs are connected, if one RTU goes down it will bring all the rest down with it. For example, if just one RTU leaves a carrier channel open, it will drown out traffic from every RTU on that port. This seriously affects your network visibility - if any other RTU has a critical alarm to report, you'll never know about it.
Your monitoring can't grow to meet the future needs of your network. You've already reached the maximum number of RTUs that can be connected from the I/O ports you have. Where can you go from there? Trying to connect more will just make your polling even worse.

Replacing Your Legacy Master Dramatically Improves Polling Speed and Fault Tolerance

These problems are bad enough, but they are merely the visible effects of the root problem: the legacy master is slow and underpowered. Even if it weren't burdened with too much bridging, the system is still inadequate for your real monitoring needs.

The solution is to replace your under-ported legacy master with a new, modern master. The new master has an adequate number of ports, so you can add more polling legs and reduce the number of bridges between the master and the RTUs.

Optimized bridging can quadruple your polling speed. You'll see network threats as they happen, not after they happen.

Equally as important, the increased network diversity distributes your polling leg failure risk, creating a more fault-tolerant system. If an RTU goes bad it brings down only its local polling leg, not the entire network.

Above all, you'll have all the advantages of a new, modern master, including faster processing, more robust operation, after-hours monitoring, automatic notifications, nuisance alarm filtering, and full manufacturer support.

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