How can small and medium enterprises purchase suitable stack switches?

Stack switches are quite common, So I studied how small and medium-sized enterprises can purchase suitable stack switches. Here I will share with you, hoping they will be useful to you. According to the performance and user needs of the stack switches on the market, I think you need to pay attention to the following aspects when purchasing a switch. You can also refer to these aspects.

Stack bandwidth

The stack switch is used to solve the bandwidth shortage problem from the hardware. However, most switches on the market are stacked through Gigabit expansion slots, and the stack bandwidth is only 2 Gbps, it is easy to cause data flow congestion. Therefore, we should try to choose products with high stack bandwidth, but pay attention to cost effectiveness. Currently, the bandwidth of some products using the latest stack technology can reach dozens of Gbps, but the price is relatively high.

Stack Technology

The traditional stack technology is based on the CPU, and the future development trend is to use hardware processing, while starting the ACL, port rate limit, and traffic monitoring, it does not affect the ability of L2 or L3 switches to forward data packets at the wire speed. Similarly, for multicast services, a large number of multicast data packets must be copied by the switch and distributed to multiple receiving ports. Therefore, the replication performance of multicast packets is the key to ensuring the smooth development of multicast services. Make sure that on the selected vswitch, the replication of multicast packets is completed by the hardware ASIC chip rather than the CPU.

Stackable quantity and Transmission Performance

Currently, the number of stacked switches on the market can reach 6 to 9, or even higher. This high stack function can achieve flexible network expansion. However, you must note that the performance of the vswitch is not affected while implementing high stack.

Multiple ports

Currently, many vswitches provide Ethernet ports at 10/100 Mbps. However, in the face of rapid technological development, it is recommended that you consider providing a Mbps port and a GBIC port switch to ensure future Gigabit access and optical fiber access needs. Pay attention to whether the stack link can achieve full duplex, stacking unit and uplink redundancy, and whether there is a single fault point. The star stack structure usually has a single fault point.

Network traffic statistics and monitoring capabilities

Network traffic statistics and monitoring capabilities are an important feature of edge stack switches. There are many ways to implement traffic management, from simple SNMP, RMON to complex RMONII, Netflow, and sFlow. The key to evaluating the Traffic Management Technology lies in the following:

1. Scope of traffic management;
The second is whether comprehensive traffic information monitoring from Layer 2 to Layer 4 is supported, and whether multiple ports are supported at the same time;
Third, the cost of traffic management;
4. Can additional software and hardware be added;
5. Does traffic monitoring affect device performance;
The sixth is whether traffic monitoring consumes a large amount of CPU and memory, and whether it reduces the data forwarding capability of the device.

Availability

The stackable switch stack is used as an independent unit, which requires high availability of the device. The operation of the entire group of devices cannot be affected because of a problem with the stack unit. Therefore, selecting a stackable switch requires high availability and intelligent features such as plug-and-play.

Manageability

Many studies have demonstrated that the cost for running and managing a product during its lifecycle is higher than the initial purchase cost. Therefore, manageability is another key factor in evaluating the overall value. The inherent advantage of Stackable switches is that it is easier to manage a single logical entity than to manage multiple devices that must be configured and monitored independently. To simplify management, stack switches must be able to provide various Web-based management methods, as well as cross-Switch configuration and software upgrade.

Security

Stack switches provide comprehensive security functions, including ACL, identity authentication, port isolation, and 802.1x and VLAN functions, because users have higher and higher requirements on network security. The optimal network security control should start from the network edge, that is, the network and the Internet or user access, and distribute the network security shielding and policy execution capabilities to the network edge.

For enterprise networks, authentication and access control are usually required when users access different network service resources. For example, you can bind a MAC address to a port to restrict access from a specific port. In addition, 802.1x authentication standards have developed rapidly in terms of access authentication. Moreover, 802.1x authentication can be combined with dynamic VLAN division and dynamic ACL.

Conclusion:

With the increasing demand for enterprise information applications, many enterprises are faced with the problem of local area network upgrade and transformation. The network expansion speed increases as a whole to meet the demand for big throughput data exchange. Therefore, Ethernet switches require higher bandwidth to support network upgrade and expansion. To address these needs, stackable switches have great advantages and attractiveness. Stack switches have many advantages, including Fast Installation, good performance, strong scalability and convenient management. However, it is not easy for everyone to make full use of the scalability and flexibility of stack switches. This requires us to fully consider the future network needs when purchasing stack switches. I hope the above introduction will provide you with some help.