Manageability and Development Strategies of Stackable Switches

Mainstream stackable switches support the 802.1p and 802.1Q standards that describe the priority and VLAN, which greatly improves the performance and makes it easier for users to use. Stackable switches have the advantages of rapid deployment, good value, scalability, and ease of management. They are widely used, especially in e-commerce applications. However, evaluating a stackable switch based entirely on the price of each user port does not reflect all situations.

In fact, if the vendor calculates the price per port based on the configuration that does not meet the actual conditions or makes other assertions, it may mislead users to judge a product based on the price. The more comprehensive evaluation of Stackable switches is to increase the evaluation of scalability and manageability. When talking about scalability, many vendors list the number of user ports to support their high-reliability assurance. This is not enough. We also need to consider whether such configuration has an uplink, you also need to determine where the switch is blocked or saturated. There are three considerations: Internal Scalability: to what extent does the interconnection between stack devices limit scalability?

Bandwidth expansion: How many ports can be upgraded from 10 Mbps Ethernet to Mbps Ethernet port before the switch is overloaded?

External Scalability: to what extent does a vswitch uplink limit the data streams transmitted to other parts of the network?

Take a vswitch with 24 user ports as an example. Here we intentionally use the word "User port", because in actual configuration, a certain number of ports have been used for server or internal and external connections. If the 24 ports have 10 Mbps throughput and the stackable device is connected to a Gigabit Ethernet uplink, then, upgrading eight ports to Mbps Ethernet will make the uplink saturated.

The calculation process is as follows: 8 Mbps ports are equal to Mbps throughput, while the remaining 16 10 Mbps ports are equal to Mbps throughput. A total throughput of Mbps means that further rapid Ethernet upgrades cannot be implemented without blocking the 1 Gbps uplink. In addition, many 3rd-layer stackable switches do not support differentiated services, service types, or multi-protocol tag switching, therefore, this type of Stackable switch requires an external router or an additional 3rd-layer switch to obtain the required management features.

Manageability

Many studies have demonstrated that the costs involved in operation and management cost more in the life of the product than the initial purchase cost of the product. Therefore, manageability is another key factor in evaluating the overall value. The inherent advantage of a stackable switch is that it is easier to manage a single logical entity than to manage multiple devices that must be configured and monitored independently. However, there are still some other factors that need to be studied, including the service quality QoS for priority data streams), the ability to execute policies, the ability to manage VLAN transmission streams, and ease of management and operation.

QoS features focus on saving the required bandwidth and forwarding the transmission stream to support the needs of different service levels. Generally, stackable switches support the 802.1p and 802.1Q standards that describe the priority and VLAN. However, when it comes to the support for the resource retention protocol used to reserve the specified bandwidth for a specific data stream), the results are different, resource Reservation is indispensable to ensure that sufficient bandwidth is available during connection establishment.

Policy support

A policy is a rule that controls the behavior of a vswitch. The Network Administrator uses the policy to allocate bandwidth, priority, and control network access to the application stream, the focus is on the bandwidth management policies required to meet the service level agreement and the method of publishing policies to the switch. Configuring a vswitch at a time requires a lot of manpower and may cause input errors. Therefore, the policy must be published to the vswitch group. When a new policy is required, a large number of switches should be quickly modified. Therefore, you need to check whether the stackable switch supports the directory enable network and light Directory Access Protocol, and General Open Policy Service (a protocol with more features to be implemented ).

You can use VLANs to manage transmission streams across multiple switches or stacked devices. Currently, all products support 802.1Q-defined VLANs. Many products also support other VLANs Based on vswitch ports, Media Access Control addresses, layer-3rd protocols, or policies.