SMB Ethernet Switches. Save now, Pay Later

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.Â This is a Zyxel 1910-48Â Gigabit Switch. It cost the measly price of Â£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

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