Ethernet switches: high speed and high performance have become the mainstream development trend

Ethernet switches are still commonly used, so I have studied the future development direction of Ethernet switches. Here I will share with you, hoping to help you. With the further construction of information networks in China and the further improvement of network quality, high-speed and high-performance Ethernet switches will become the mainstream of network product development.

A switch is an essential device for the network of large and medium-sized enterprises. It plays an important role in network construction and can increase the network capacity and speed. In China, with the further construction of information networks, the Ethernet switch market is in fierce competition like other markets. Some experts estimate that in the future 1 ~ In the past three years, the market demand for switch products in China will increase significantly, and IT will become one of the fastest growing fields. At present, with the increasingly wide range of Switch Applications and increasing market competition, many changes have taken place in switch products. New product development trends are brewing in the process of changes, as shown in the following aspects.

Low-end switch: required control function

The peak of broadband network construction was once high, but it soon revealed that due to the imperfect existing technologies and equipment functions, the bandwidth network profit model was single and could not meet the needs of users at multiple levels and the price bearing capacity. To improve the profitability of a broadband network, the operation and management of the network are achieved. The key problem is that operators need to change the billing mode of a single subscription system to provide differentiated services at different prices. Currently, medium and low-end switches need to have the bandwidth division and control functions not available for general L2 switches, so that operators can provide bandwidth as required by users and achieve monthly billing by bandwidth, flexible adaptation to different user needs and consumption capabilities.

Gigabit Switch: manageable

From the technical point of view, Gigabit Ethernet products already have very mature and complete technical standards. From the perspective of local area network design and application, switches that currently support Gigabit Ethernet technology can be divided into gigabit core switch devices, Gigabit Working Group switch devices, and gigabit desktop switch devices.

Due to the deepening of the informatization and Network processes of domestic enterprises and the popularization of Enterprise LAN construction, the sales of Gigabit Ethernet switches have increased significantly. GE backbone switches should be able to provide users with optimal performance to eliminate network bottlenecks, while Ge backbone switches should be highly manageable, it is necessary to well support functions such as VLAN, link aggregation, spanning tree, broadcast storm control, IP multicast, and QoS. In an enterprise network, a gigabit access switch is a switch that is uplinked to a backbone network, downlink to a working group, or a desktop. It is generally used between different departments or floors of an enterprise. Of course, these vswitches must have excellent performance. At the same time, because they are directly connected to users, remote management is required for functional features such as VLAN and address filtering.

10G switch: Communication Between TCP/IP and Telecommunication Network

With the increasing popularity of Gigabit Ethernet to desktop, 10-Gigabit Ethernet technology will be widely used in the aggregation layer and backbone layer. However, in terms of the current network situation, the first application of 10-Gigabit Ethernet will be the backbone of the education industry, data center egress, and man. When building a man, if Ethernet technology is adopted at the aggregation layer and even the backbone layer, it will be advantageous in many aspects, such as cost reduction, concise network structure, and high scalability; the carrier can use a 10-ge Ethernet switch to connect to the upper and lower-layer nodes, eliminating the need for dedicated OADM and DWDM devices. This eliminates the redundant layers, reduces the cost of building a man, and reduces the management cost, expansion will be simpler in the future.

10G Ethernet fills a gap between the TCP/IP network and the traditional telecommunication network, further migrating to the group network. 10G Ethernet is more cost-effective than Sonet/SDH's OC-192 port several times, at the same time, it is much easier to manage and operate. It is foreseeable that there will be more and more 10G switch products in the future.

Layer-3 Switch: not equal to vro

With the rapid development of China's enterprise network, campus network and broadband construction, layer-3 switches have once again found a new market growth point, its applications also penetrate from the initial backbone layer and aggregation layer to the edge access layer. A layer-3 switch can operate on the layer-3 of the network protocol and act as a route decision. It can achieve the layer-2 switching speed almost at a relatively low price. In the current hot broadband network construction, layer-3 switches are usually placed in the center of the residential area and the aggregation layer of multiple residential areas. Due to the emergence of layer-3 switches, in the future, layer-3 switches will dominate the LAN.

Many people think that layer-3 switches can replace routers. But in fact, although a layer-3 Switch has shaken the status of an enterprise router to some extent, it cannot completely replace the router. A layer-3 Switch cannot provide a complete routing protocol, while a router can process multiple protocols at the same time. For networks connected to different protocols, such as Ethernet and the combination of the ring, it is impossible to transmit data between networks by using a layer-3 switch. In addition, vrouters also have layer-4 network management capabilities, which are not available in layer-3 vswitches. When using a layer-3 switch, and when developing a layer-3 switch, the user should make it clear that a layer-3 switch is not the same as a router and cannot completely replace the router.

Mainstream Network Management

Although network management has been available for a long time, it has never been paid due attention. This is because the network was small at that time, and the complexity was not high. A simple network management system could meet the needs of normal network management, so there was little research on it. However, with the development of the network, the scale increases gradually and the complexity increases constantly. The previous network management technology cannot adapt to the rapid development of the network.

At present, many vendors have proposed the concept of full-process network management. First, they have set up the entire network system on network products that can be managed by network management, from the network card of the PC in the user's home to the corridor switch and aggregation layer switch, go to the core switch to complete the hardware architecture of the entire Community network, and then control and manage the entire network through authentication billing and network management software to achieve bandwidth management and optimize the entire network application, make full use of limited network resources. All-round network management targets all layers of the Community, a variety of applications, a variety of devices, hardware devices including the user's network card, a variety of switches; at the same time, in order to provide users with a rich range of functions, full-process network management also manages various applications and services, such as setting the user's bandwidth.

Network Construction calls for intelligence

The decline in prices and the depth of applications enable users to put forward new requirements for vswitches, instead of simply meeting the concept of switching and the number of ports, ethernet switches are required to develop new features in terms of manageability, security, support for streaming media on demand, and service quality assurance. The need for practical applications is the source of creativity, which produces smart 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 the priority transmission of important applications needs to be ensured. Enterprises need to set a higher priority level for key services than normal services with limited bandwidth, and a higher priority level for time-sensitive traffic than normal traffic, for example, the priority of services such as ERP, voice, and CAD/CAM is higher than that of FTP or SMTP. QoS meets user requirements in network applications, ensuring that important services are not delayed during network congestion and overload, ensuring network efficiency.

Smart switches provide flexible QoS support, including traffic identification and classification, and provide customized services for specific traffic. When network congestion occurs, it provides the best priority service for applications with high latency sensitivity, such as voice video streams, so as to more reliably safeguard customers' key applications and business data.

In the future, with the further development of domestic communication equipment manufacturers, the competition for Ethernet switches will shift from low-end to high-end. In addition, the product will also turn to a variety of features will be more and more, high-speed, high-performance Ethernet switches will become the mainstream of China's domestic network market.