N-TRON Corp. has announced a strategic marketing and sales agreement with California-based Opto 22, a top provider of control, remote monitoring and data acquisition solutions for industrial automation.  As part of the agreement, Opto 22 will resell N-TRON’s industrial Ethernet switches and wireless access points to their customers.

“Opto 22 is well-known and respected in the automation and control industry with a rich history of innovation in the development of solid state relays and Ethernet-based I/O systems and controllers,” said Warren Nicholson, N-TRON CEO and President. “N-TRON industrial networking switches can be an essential part of any wired or wireless application. Our two company’s products complement each other perfectly and having them available through Opto 22 creates a single-source for engineers and other automation professionals looking for the components to solve process and machine control, monitoring, data acquisition, and networking communications challenges.”

Opto 22 vice-president of sales, Bob Sheffres, is enthusiastic about the relationship stating, “We’re proud to offer these components as a compliment to our Ethernet-based controllers and I/O, and we feel confident that combined, these products are well-suited for standard Ethernet connected automation projects, as well as those that utilize wireless communication. N-TRON industrial Ethernet switches are counted among the industry’s most reliable networking devices. Independent testing by our own quality assurance team confirmed this.”

N-TRON’s managed switches should prove most beneficial to Opto 22 customers, largely due to the hardware’s impressive list of advanced features and functionality, which includes trunking, port mirroring and IGMP snooping—which provides faster/more streamlined/automatic multicast messaging by intelligently filtering and forwarding (and thus reducing) network traffic among devices.

Customers with applications in which Opto 22 hardware is communicating to Allen-Bradley PLCs, as they seek to route EtherNet/IP protocol-based multicast messages, will find the N-TRON switches’ IGMP snooping features particularly beneficial.

“The N-TRON hardware’s IGMP snooping functionality is by far the best we’ve seen,” says Bryce Nakatani, quality assurance engineer at Opto 22. "Their managed switches provide very high levels of ‘leak-proof’ throughput, making them ideal for building network architectures that include our line of intelligent remote I/O for Allen-Bradley systems.”
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www.opto22.com