Switch: High speed, high performance into the mainstream

With the further construction of China's information network, the further improvement of network quality, high-speed, high-performance Ethernet switch will become the mainstream of network product development.





switch is an essential equipment for the network of large and medium sized enterprises, it plays a very important role in network construction, it can increase network capacity and improve network speed. In China, with the further construction of information Network, Ethernet switch market is in fierce competition with other kinds of market.





experts estimate that in the next 1-3 years, China's market demand for switch products will increase significantly, will become the IT industry one of the fastest growing areas. At present, with the wide application of switch and the intensification of market competition, many changes have taken place in switch products. Changes in the brewing of new product development trends, specific performance in the following areas.





Low-end switch: Need control function





Broadband network construction boom was once high, but soon exposed because of the existing technology and equipment function is not perfect, broadband network profit model is single, can not well adapt to the user multi-level needs and affordability. To improve the profitability of broadband network is to achieve the network can operate, manageable, the current key problem is that operators need to change the single monthly billing model, to provide different prices of differentiated services.





at present, the middle and low-end switches need to have a general two-tier switch does not have the Bandwidth division and control functions, so that operators can provide bandwidth according to user requirements, can be achieved by the bandwidth of monthly billing, flexible adaptation to different users of different needs and consumption capabilities.





Gigabit Switch: Toward manageable





from a technical point of view, Gigabit Ethernet products have been very mature and perfect technical standards. From the point of view of the local area network design, the switch which supports Gigabit Ethernet technology is divided into gigabit core switching devices, Gigabit workgroup switching devices, and gigabit desktop switching devices.





As a result of the domestic enterprise informatization and network process deepening and enterprise LAN construction popularization, Gigabit Ethernet switch sales have increased significantly. Gigabit backbone switches should be able to provide users with the best performance to eliminate the network "bottleneck", at the same time gigabit backbone switches should have a very strong manageability, to support the VLAN, link aggregation, spanning tree, broadcast storm control, IP Multicast, QoS and other functions. In the enterprise network Gigabit access switches are connected to the backbone, the allied to the workgroup or desktop switches, generally used in different parts of the enterprise or between different floors. This kind of switch of course has very good performance, and because of direct connection to the user, for functional features such as VLAN, address filtering, remote management requirements are very high.





: Communication TCP/IP and telecommunications network





with the increasing popularity of gigabit to desktop, Gigabit Ethernet technology will be widely used in the convergence layer and backbone layer. But in the current network situation, the first application of Gigabit Ethernet will be the education industry and data center export, the backbone of the metropolitan area network.





when building a metropolitan area network, if the convergence layer and even the backbone layer Unified Ethernet technology, will have equipment cost reduction, network structure concise, high scalability and other advantages; operators can use Gigabit Ethernet switches to connect the upper and lower nodes, no longer need dedicated oadm and DWDM equipment, thus eliminating the redundancy level , reduce the cost of building a metropolitan area network, its management cost can be reduced at the same time, the future expansion will be more simple.





Gigabit Ethernet fills a gap between TCP/IP and traditional telecommunication networks, which makes migration to packet networks further. Gigabit Ethernet is more cost-effective than SONET/SDH OC-192 ports, and is much simpler to manage and operate. It can be foreseen that the future of the million-gigabit switch products will be more and more.


three-layer switch: Not equal to Router





with the rapid development of enterprise network, Campus network and broadband construction in our country, the three-layer switch has found new market growth point again, its application also from the initial backbone layer, the convergence layer has penetrated to the edge of the access layer. The three-layer switch can operate on the third layer of the network protocol, play the role of routing decision, and have the speed of the second layer exchange, and the price is relatively low. In the current hot broadband network construction, three-tier switches are generally placed in the center of the community and a number of community convergence layer, due to the emergence of three-tier switches, three-tier switches will dominate the LAN in the future has become an indisputable fact.





Many people think that the three-tier switch can replace the router. But in fact, the three-tier switch, while somehow shaking the corporate router's position, does not completely replace the router. The three-tier switch does not yet provide a complete routing protocol, and routers have the ability to handle multiple protocols at the same time. For networks that connect different protocols, such as Ethernet and Token ring, it is impossible for network data to be transferred through three-layer switch. In addition, routers also have a fourth layer of network management capabilities, which is not available in the three-tier switch.





users in the use of the process and manufacturers in the development of three-tier switches should be clear that the three-tier switch is not equal to routers, and can not completely replace the router.





network management into the mainstream





Although network management has been very early, but has not received due attention. This is because the network at that time is small, secondly, the complexity is not high, a simple network management system can meet the needs of the normal network management, and therefore less research. But with the development of the network, the scale gradually increases, the complexity increases, the former network management technology can not adapt to the rapid development of the network.





at present, many manufacturers have put forward the concept of full network management, first of all, set up the entire system in network networks can be networked products, from the user's PC network card, to the corridor switch, convergence layer switch, and then to the core switch, complete the entire Community network hardware architecture, Then through the authentication billing and network management software to control and manage the entire network, to achieve management bandwidth, optimize the entire network application, make full use of limited network resources. The object of the entire network management, facing the community in all levels, a variety of applications, various devices, hardware devices, including the user side of the network card, a variety of switches; At the same time, in order to provide users with rich services, the whole network management also to the various applications and services to manage, such as





Network construction calls for intelligent




The decline of
price and the depth of application have made users put forward new requirements to the switch, no longer only satisfied with the simple Exchange concept and the number of ports, the need for the switch in the manageability, security, support streaming media on demand and service quality assurance on the development of new features. The need for practical applications is the source of creativity, which generates intelligent switches.





For more and more data, voice and video applications on the network, the network needs to be guaranteed according to the characteristics of different applications, and it needs to ensure the priority transmission of important applications. Enterprises need to have a limited bandwidth on the key business settings than ordinary business priority, the time-sensitive traffic set a higher priority than ordinary traffic, such as the requirements of ERP, voice and CAD/CAM business priority higher than the FTP or SMTP priority. QoS in network applications to achieve the needs of users, to ensure that when the network congestion, overload, the important business will not delay, to ensure the efficiency of the network.




The
"smart" switch provides a flexible support for QoS that includes the ability to identify and classify traffic and provide customized services for specific traffic. In the case of network congestion, the application of high delay sensitivity (such as voice video streaming) can provide the best priority service, so as to guarantee the customer's key application and business data more reliably.





future, with the further development of domestic communications equipment manufacturers, will be the Ethernet switch competition from low-end to high-end. Moreover, the product will also turn to diversify, function will be more and more, high-speed, high-performance Ethernet switch will become the mainstream of China's domestic network market.