Netgear's Advanced Gb Smart Switches Maximize Price/Performance

Increasingly, SMB's need advanced switch features such as Power over Ethernet PoE for VoIP phones, Quality of Service (QoS) to support voice and real-time traffic, and higher bandwidth but at a price that won't break the bank and that are easy to use and manage.  Netgear's ProSafe Advanced Gb Smart Switches balance those needs at an estimated street price of $899.99 for the 24 port GS724TPS and $1,699.99 for the 48 port GS748TPS.

These switches are designed for SMB, 250 seats is the target network size, that need some of the advanced capabilities in switches, but don't necessarily have the IT staff to manage enterprise switches from the like of Cisco and HP Procurve. For example, these switches are only managed through a web UI or with Netgear's ProSafe Network Management Software.

Eric Gorman, COO of Integrated Enterprise Solutions, Inc, said  "The price point is excellent compared to other products with similar capabilities. We use them for our own network. PoE doesn't raise the price of the switch much. We recommend and deploy PoE switches for our customers so they are set for future growth. When they want to move t o VoIP, they already have PoE in place."

Both switches can power upto half the port count, 12 or 24 ports, at 15.4 watts or the full compliment of ports at 7.5 watts.  The switch software automatically manages the power budget by only providing the necessary power to each port. The switch is can also support four ports of PoE+, 802.3at, which offers 30 a maximum of 30 watts for power hungry devices like IP cameras.  Unfortunately, there isn't any way to  augment the power with external power supplies nor is there support for redundant power in case one power supply fails.

The switches can be stacked six high using stacking cables giving 144 or 288 ports managed as a single instance. Stacked switches can communicate over the 10Gbps cables full duplex giving a total of 20Gb/s between switches and the cables can be chained to form a ring allowing communications in the event a switch fails or if you need to add or remove a switch.The switches use the Organizational Unit Identifier (OUI) of the MAC address to identify a VoIP phone, and can provision power and networking, such as putting the phone onto a voice VLAN for prioritization, automatically. We'd prefer Netgear support either the IEEE Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) or Cisco's Discovery Protocol (CDP) since most VoIP phones support one or both protocols and gives a better representation of the phones power and networking needs.