Why You Should Consider Using a Time Server in Your Network

 

One of our newest product lines runs the precision timing gamut from master clocks and digital displays right through to analog clocks and time servers.

Time servers are a key technology for many of our customers because proper network time synchronisation is an essential part of both monitoring and resolving issues within their network. Accurate timestamping is key to root-cause analysis, allowing users to establish when problems occurred and to find patterns within the data. If devices on the network are out of sync by even just a few milliseconds it can be very difficult to determine the sequence of events.

A time server is a clever little bit of kit that reads the time from a reference clock and sends the information to its clients using a computer network. The time server itself can be an internet time server, or a local network time server depending on the facility and user requirements.

Internet time servers can use a variety of well-defined protocols to distribute and sync time across the network; the most well-known and widely used of which is the Network Time Protocol (NTP) which has been in operation since 1985. 

The Masterclock NTP100 family of NTP time servers provide accurate timing to networks and conform to NTPv2 (RFC 1119), NTPv3 (RFC 1306) and NTPv4 (RFC 5905). Each NTP100 device can operate on a local area network (LAN) or act as an enterprise-wide source for legally-traceable time and date distribution, depending upon your network configuration requirements. 

Masterclock NTP servers are compatible with IPv4/IPv6 networks and offer AES256 SSH encryption, as well as MD5 authentication, for secure communications. All models are also available with an internal OCXO for increased holdover stability.

Our knowledgeable engineering team is available to discuss your time server requirements. Please contact us by email : info@sarsen.net or give us a call - 01672 511166 and we'll be happy to answer any questions you have regarding time servers, Masterclock or any of our other product lines.