Akshantha,
Sadly, the answer is "it depends".
rings need protection. which means a protocol needs to run to prevent broadcast storms.
the default is Spanning Tree. Spanning was not designed for rings but will work. teh cisco recommendation for spanning tree is 7 hops max from the Spanning tree root.
REP is the most common purpose built ring redundancy feature across cisco and IE. Ring can be very large with REP. we have customers deploying up to 100 switches in a REP ring. Although this is not recommended, it will work. cisco recommends REP Rings be no larger than 26 nodes. at 26 nodes Cisco can maintain 50ms recovery for a single failure in the ring.
