eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
D-Link announced on Oct. 4 a family of fully managed Lite Layer 3 stackable Gigabit switches, the DXS-3400 Series, designed for small to medium-size businesses (SMBs), small to medium-size enterprises (SMEs) and schools. The DXS-3400 Series is also well-suited for top-of-rack switching in data centers.
Available in both 10G Copper (10GBASE-T) and 10G fiber (SFP+) versions, these switches feature wire speed 10-Gigabit Ethernet switching, routing and ultra-low latency.
“A user-friendly management interface is important for a lot of reasons. For example, not all network administrators are highly certified IT professionals—especially in small businesses, schools, offices and SOHO environments,” Steven Olen, D-Link’s director of product marketing for business solutions, told eWEEK. “D-Link provides networking equipment for all these markets, and understands the importance of easy-to-use technology.”
Olen explained the company recently worked with a small school that had no IT staff.
“Instead, one or two members of the teaching faculty took on double-duty and handled their IT needs,” he said. “For situations like this, D-Link finds a lot of utility with our intuitive, user-friendly graphical user interface. It makes configuration, management and monitoring easy, even for non-IT professionals.”
Olen explained that for more network-savvy professionals, D-Link managed switches—such as the new DXS-3400—can also be managed using an industry-standard command line interface (CLI), and users can select the best method to suit their needs.
“One data management challenge SMBs face is that every network needs Ethernet switches, yet networks can be very different in terms of the requirements for those switches,” Olen said.
Switches have an internal database and need to remember a lot of different things, including MAC addresses, IPv4 addresses, IPv6 addresses, VLAN membership and VPN information, he said.
A simple Layer 2 network will rely mostly on MAC addresses, for example, and these switches will need large MAC tables.
On the other hand, switches in a complex Layer 3 network in an IPv6 environment will need larger IPv6 Host Tables.
“Most switches have fixed memory capacities for these tables, and because a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t always work, their databases can often be overwhelmed,” Olen said.
Along with the recently introduced DGS-3630 Series Gigabit switches, the new DXS-3400 switches also support an innovative feature called switch resource management (SRM), which provides resource configuration flexibility that allows network administrators to allocate more system resources for tables that require more entries, and prevents wasting resources on unused functions.
The DXS-3400 Series switches support three SRM modes—IP Mode, LAN Mode and L2 VPN Mode—which modify the size of the Layer 2 and 3 tables for optimum efficiency.