Transcript: NETGEAR Introduces Gigabit Speed to Their Stackable Smart Switches

This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/2149/netgear-introduces-gigabit-speed-to-their-stackable-smart-switches

Guest: Sanjay Kumar - NETGEAR
Host: Paul Lancour - PodTech

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Hi, I'm Paul Lancour with PodTech.net and I'm here today with Sanjay Kumar, he's product line manager with NETGEAR. Sanjay, thanks for stopping by.

Sanjay Kumar - NETGEAR
Thanks for having me Paul.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Thanks for coming by today and bringing a couple of smart switches from NETGEAR, now this is a solution that NETGEAR has introduced to the market to address the specific needs of small and medium-sized businesses and I was wondering if you could start by telling us what about the smart switches specifically addresses the needs of SMBs.

Sanjay Kumar - NETGEAR
Well I start by giving you a little bit of context, Paul. So, small, medium-sized businesses have a lot of demands on them today. So they grow very rapidly and they are looking to deploy a lot of advanced technologies like let's say Voice-Over IP, Videoconferencing, and all of these issues really place a lot of demands on the network itself so while they have -- they're growing in this rapid manner, at the same time they don't necessarily have either the budget or the resources to be able to manage all these network infrastructure. In the past they had -- there were essentially two options that small medium-sized businesses had before them.

They could either buy unmanaged solutions which were very plug and play kind of solutions but certainly didn't offer any management capabilities, if something went wrong there was no way you could troubleshoot that particular device. On the other end of the spectrum, you had Layer 2 managed switches and Layer 2 managed switches while they offered a lot of features, certainly came with a lot of complexity and certainly with a high cost. Smart switches addressed space in between.

So we offer the features that Layer 2 managed switches do, at the same time, we offer a lot of simplicity in terms of management. The management capabilities are through a Web interface. It's an extremely familiar interface to everyone and all you have to do is type in an IP address in your Web browser and you can visually manage your entire switch. So it takes much less effort as well as resources in terms of managing your network. Now specifically where it comes to the growth issues that small medium businesses have, the solutions so far have been to what we call 'daisy chain'. It's a daisy chaining approach.

So you buy one switch and as you add more users to your network, what you do is you add another switch and then you use high speed ports up in the front that you have over here -- usually gigabit ports and you connect these two using cables and as and when you add more users, you add another switch and you keep connecting through daisy chain.

Now that has several problems associated with it. Number one, you are using up higher speed ports which you could've otherwise used to connect to a high speed email server, for example, Enterprise Resource Planning or whatever other high bandwidth applications you may have on your network. The second problem is, you're sharing bandwidth and as you grow your network, your bandwidth or your throughput gets compromised because you've added more and more switches to a shared, what we call a backplane.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
So with each of these that you add to the daisy chain, it reduces the overall speed of the network is what I understand you're saying.

Sanjay Kumar - NETGEAR
Absolutely. Very well put. The third problem that you have is, that there's lack of redundancy. If there was any break in either the cable or a switch in what we spoke about, a stack, the entire network would go down...

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Right.

Sanjay Kumar - NETGEAR
...and then the final problem that you had is, you had to manage each one of these switches independently. That means that if you have six switches in your network, you've got to manage them six times over so it's a lot of resources and time being spent in managing that network.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Well I imagine the reason you told me about some of the problems is because these stackable smart switches take care of a lot of those problems.

Sanjay Kumar - NETGEAR
You've caught on to that also. So what we have over here, are stackable switches and if I may show you, the first thing that we've done is, we've provided two high speed stacking ports at the rear of the switch. Several advantages to that. It's an elegant solution because it doesn't interfere with the ports that you have upfront and all the cable management that you might want -- issues that you might have up front. The second advantage that you have is, you're longer sacrificing the high speed ports that you have up front.

You can continue to use those for high bandwidth applications. As we said, might be email servers, ERP applications, Video conferencing, whatever you might be doing on your network. The third thing that this thing provides you with is redundancy, because we have two cables in this particular configuration, if one fails, the other one takes over so your network will no longer gets disrupted.

You'll always have business continuity. Finally, with this kind of stacking capability, we have also have a fairly intelligent management system. So we're using the same Web interface, but we're able to provide you with what we call single IP address management for the entire stack. You can put six switches together in this stack and manage them all through one interface, so as compared to using six times the number of resources, you've cut that down to just having one instance of management for the entire stack.

Now this management is also extremely intelligent. The stack can detect as and when switches have been added to the network or removed from the network. In case of a failure as we said it's redundant, if a switch was to be removed, the stack still stays alive, the switch at the stack master recognizes that a switch has been lost and makes up for it.

It also maintains the configuration of the entire stack. When you insert a switch into the stack and you can do that seamlessly again, hot-swappable without disrupting the network, the stack master will recognize oh there's a new member of the stack and it will check to see what software version it has. It will automatically synchronize it to what's on the stack so you have one instance of software rather than multiple software versions to manage. Again, as I said you can do this all through the Web interface and it's extremely a simple way of managing a lot of complex features that you would otherwise find only with Layer 2 managed switches.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
So I can see how with SMBs this would really address a lot of the needs that they have for growth and as you said, I add one of these in and it doesn't reduce the speed of my network at all, it's really easy to very modular to put them in. So why wouldn't an SMB just go with a Layer 2 fully managed solution for their network needs instead of this?

Sanjay Kumar - NETGEAR
Simply because they're more complex -- certainly more complex to manage. They come with a lot of overhead in terms of costs -- in terms of both initial costs; capital expenditure, as well as on going costs because you've got to train your professionals to be familiar with the command line interfaces that Layer 2 managed switches have and that certainly takes -- it's certainly much more expensive to do that. With the kind of Web management that we provide, an entry level IT professional can also manage your entire network and that in fact will lower your total cost of ownership.

Now the other thing in the past was that Layer 2 managed switches offered a lot more in terms of features; advanced features for security for example, advanced features for quality of service which helps you prioritize traffic based on what applications you are running. For example, Voice-Over IP requires you to prioritize the traffic at a much higher level than you would let's say email traffic.

Today we are able to offer all those features in the smart switches, specifically the stackable smart switches, so you have advanced security so that you have a much more robust network. We have what I call access control lists that allow you to filter traffic based on who's sending the traffic, whom it's going to. We have 802.1X authentication which allows you to really secure the perimeter of your network. It's an authentication mechanism. We also have advanced quality of service that you can prioritize voice traffic, for example or video traffic, or even mission critical applications like ERP for that matter.

So we're able to offer all these advanced features that we typically found only with Layer 2 managed switches in this package, which is much more manageable and much more affordable.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
I understand that NETGEAR has recently added gigabits feed to the smart switches as well.

Sanjay Kumar - NETGEAR
That's a great point Paul, so all these ports over here, they're line rate gigabit ports. So twenty-four port version or the forty-eight port version gives you line rate, that means there's absolutely no compromise in the throughput, you get full gigabit speeds and today, given the number of applications that are being deployed in the SMB - high bandwidth applications; let's say it's a small business that's in the health services industry, for example.

They typically exchange very, very large data files maybe digital images being exchanged between offices. It could be a consulting firm, it could be a bunch of lawyers who have very large files being exchanged and or you may have video conferencing. All of this requires high bandwidth and gigabit to the desktop is what we deliver with these switches, in order to enable all those different applications.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
If our viewers were interested in more information about smart switches, were would you have them go?

Sanjay Kumar - NETGEAR
Netgear.com is the best place to go. www.netgear.com We have information about all our switches and in particular the stackable switches and more information can always be found by contacting a certified NETGEAR reseller as well, and we offer links on our site as well for that.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Great. Thanks for taking some time in talking to us today, Sanjay.

Sanjay Kumar - NETGEAR
Thank you for the opportunity.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Sanjay Kumar is product line manager with NETGEAR.