Netgear Launches Gigabit Smart Switches

Networking solutions specialist Netgear announced two ProSafe Advanced Gigabit Smart Switches, the GS724TPS and GS748TPS, which the company claims are the industry’s first Gigabit smart switches designed for small to medium-sized businesses that combine Gigabit connectivity, Power-over-Ethernet and stacking, all on the same platform.

The GS7xxTPS series is designed to help SMBs migrate their current infrastructure to a converged network that may include wireless LANs, VOIP phones or IP-PBXs and video teleconferencing. With PoE capabilities on all ports and Auto Voice VLAN features, the switches can help customers to set up the PoE-enabled IP phones and wireless access points wherever they need to without changing the wiring infrastructure. In addition, the first four ports on each switch can also support PoE+, based on the IEEE802.3at draft standards, providing up to 30W to higher-powered PoE devices such as multichannel wireless access points, pan-tilt-zoomed IP cameras, and touch-screen IP phones.

As members of the Netgear ProSafe Advanced Smart Switch family, the GS724TPS and GS748TPS also come with a suite of features such as access control lists (ACL), 802.1x port authentication, enhanced QoS, rate limiting and Internet group management protocol (IGMP) snooping, among others features. There are two dedicated HDMI ports delivering up to 20 Gbps stacking bandwidth on each switch. Customers can stack up to six switches or 288 ports together and manage them with one IP address. The stacking features also include redundancy and are hot-swappable. Since they are extensions of the same Gigabit Stackable Smart Switch family, the GS724TPS and GS748TPS can also be stacked with the GS7xxTS switches (GS724TS and GS748TS).

Maggie Wu, Netgear’s product line manager for smart switching products, said as SMBs continue to leverage VOIP, wireless and other converged network technologies to make their businesses more productive and streamline their networks, they require advanced switching infrastructure that supports their needs now and in the future. “Our ProSafe GS7xxTPS Series of Advanced Gigabit Smart Switches meets these requirements to support key applications such as VOIP-based call centers, branch/remote offices and organizations with unified wireless and wireline networks,” she said. “The GS7xxTPS series offers performance, ease-of-use, scalability, and reliability by supporting the right combination of features at an affordable cost.”

Netgear said SMBs can manage all ProSafe Gigabit Stackable Smart Switches as though they were one unit, from a user-friendly Web console that can be used to configure all features, as well as monitor and troubleshoot. Features include single IP address, automatic master back-up, automatic firmware synchronization across stack and master maintains configuration for entire stack. These switches also have SNMP (v1, 2 and 3) to collect and track data to monitor the network health, as well as manage devices.

“Until we went with Netgear, we were unclear how to approach a converged network deployment, since the infrastructure features we needed were out of our price range,” said Gary Howell, managing technical director of professional ICT consultancy firm Morgan Walsh Consultancy Ltd. “Since installation, the GS7xxTPS Stackable Switches have operated flawlessly, providing high performance network connectivity across multiple VLANS, with really easy administration. We couldn’t have asked for a better solution.”