We are all familiar with the “Small Business” range of Information Technology products. They are the crippled versions of the Enterprise range of products for grown up big business.
Manufacturers work hard to remove or disable features so they can sell products to “Small Business” at a lower cost. As small business owner this is appealing as you need to watch your capex and opex costs. Running a small business is not easy.
So you buy your small business switches, because they are cheaper than the big boys switches.
However as you use these switches they become a source of pain. This is because although you are a small business, You still need 802.1x port security , DHCP Snooping, 802.1q trunking, Jumbo Frames, flow control, Qos, LACP aggregation etc etc.
The reason for this is because small business’s are now using smaller versions of Enterprise functionality.
Small business’s are using virtualisation, Voice Over IP, Wireless Mobile devices, Network attached storage and Video Conferencing.
This technology is no longer the area of just Enterprise big business.
Over the past years a few manufactures have realized this and started to produce feature rich affordable switches which have small business pricing but enterprise features.
Take for example the switch pictured in this post. This is a Zyxel 1910-48 Gigabit Switch. It cost the measly price of £240.00 ex VAT. ( I did mention this is a 48 port GIGABIT switch)
It is a layer 2 Access layer switch but it has everything you could need to deploy a VOIP, security, virtualisation or streaming project.
Show me any other Small business “Smart” switch which has this functionality.
It is quite simple, DON’T Buy fisher price “Small Business” switches because, that will be a very stupid thing to do ! You might think you are saving money, but you will pay later. Buy a Zyxel instead
Standard Compliance
- IEEE 802.3
- IEEE 802.3u
- IEEE 802.3ab
- IEEE 802.3z 1000BASE-X
- IEEE 802.3x flow control
- IEEE802.3az EEE support
- IEEE802.1p CoS support
- IEEE 802.3af/at (PoE models only)
- Store and forward
- N-way auto-negotiation
Traffic Management and QoS
- Port-based VLAN
- MAC-based VLAN
- Protocol-based VLAN
- IEEE 802.1Q VLAN tagging
- Guest-VLAN
- Voice VLAN
- Storm control
- 802.1p priority queues per port
- IEEE 802.1p queuing method (scheduler)
- Input priority mapping
- QoS control list (QCL mode)
- Port-based rate limiting (ingress/egress)
- Rate Limiting, by IP/TCP/UDP
- IEEE 802.3x flow control
- Policy-based prioritization
Class of Service (CoS)
- IEEE 802.1p class of service
- DiffServ (DSCP)
- Policy-based CoS
Resilience and Availability
- IEEE 802.1D STP/802.1w RSTP/802.1s MSTP
- IEEE 802.3ad LACP
- Port error Recovery
Security
- IEEE 802.1x
- Port Security
- MAC authentication
- MAC address limit
- Layer 2 MAC filtering
- Layer 3 IP filtering
- Layer 4 TCP/UDP socket filtering
- BPDU guard
- Static MAC forwarding
- Multiple RADIUS servers
- Multiple TACACS+ servers
- RADIUS
- TACACS+
- SSL
- DHCP snooping
- ARP inspection
- UPNP
- Policy-based security filtering
- Port isolation
- IP source guard
- ACL packet filtering
Layer 2 Multicast
- IGMP snooping (v1, v2, v3)
- MVR support
- IGMP filtering
- IPv6 MLD snooping
IPv6
- Ipv6 management
- IPv6 over Ethernet (RFC 2464)
- Dual-stack (RFC 4213)
- ICMPv6 (RFC 4884)
- Neighbor discovery (RFC 4861)
- IPv6 addressing architecture (RFC 4291)
Discovery
- IEEE 802.1AB LLDP
- LLDP-MED
Network Management
- Web-based management
- SNMP v1,v2c, v3
- RMON groups 1, 2, 3, 9
- Dual-image
- NTPv4
- DHCP relay
- Syslog
- Port mirroring
- DNS
- sFlow
- EEE
MIB Information
- RFC 1213 MIB II
- IEEE 802.1Q bridge MIB
- RFC 2819 RMON (group 1, 2, 3, 9)
- RFC 3414 user-based security model for SNMPv3
- RFC 3415 view-based access control model for SNMP
- RFC 4133 entity MIB v3
- RFC 4188 bridge MIB
- IEEE 802.1 MSTP MIB
- IEEE 802.3AB LLDP-MIB
- IEEE 802.3ad LACP MIB
Certification
- Safety: LVD
- EU RoHS compliant
- EMI: FCC, CE, CNS, ICES
- BSMI: CNS14336 & CNS13438