Managed Switch Choices - Regain Control of Your Network

Welcome to ManagedSwitch.org! On this website you will find a selection of manufacturers and distributors of top managed switches available today. Whether you are an IT professional looking for a managed switch with the intention to best manage your existing network traffic, or you are a small business owner looking for a managed network switch to ensure smooth, interruption free VoIP connections over your network, or even if you are a home user who wants to achieve smooth playback of videos over your home network, you have come to the right place. We will explore here three levels of managed network switches, Unmanaged, Smart, and Managed. By the time you are done reading, you should have a better idea what each of these types of managed switches can and can not do and what kind of managed switch will best suit your needs.

Unmanaged network switches

This is the plain vanilla kind of a network switch. After turning it on and connecting the ports, it should normally "just work." An unmanaged switch basically routes and switches the internet packets on the FIFO basis, which stands for First In First Out priority. The switch makes the best effort in delivering the packet to the right port in the shortest amount of time, setting no priorities, but rather, treating all packets the same. Unmanaged switches are usually sufficient for the simplest applications where latency and timeliness is not that important. However, for time-critical applications, be it time-critical industrial applications, or for VoIP phone implementations passing through the switch, or for smooth playback of HDTV and other videos, unmanaged switches may not be sufficient.

This is a price to pay for simply having no controls available with that kind of a switch, and it being completely plug and play with no configuration necessary or available.

Smart network switches

Despite their name, smart network switches are somewhere in-between unmanaged switches and managed switches when it comes to the capability to control the flow of the information through the switch. When the initial batch of slightly less manageable, and more low-end, switches came to market, they were initially marketed as smart switches because the marketing department needed to justify the lower price point yet not call them less-manageable or un-manageable. How would that sound? Also, for wider appeal, they were typically managed over the web interface instead of over a serial port using a command line interface. So, to be "smart" about it, let's just not dwell on smart network switches but instead devote our attention to managed switches and find out what specifically they are capable of managing and what not.

Managed network switches

As mentioned above, managed network switches have features that enable you to manage several aspects of your network traffic. For instance, you can decide to limit the bandwidth of a certain port on your switch. Or, you can decide to throttle the bandwidth of a port, or even completely disable a specific port. Typical reasons for such a drastic action can be a discovery of a malware-infested computer, or any other kind of network bandwidth-hogging application on a certain computer. Or even a detection of a live intruder. Another example of a switch management function is to separate ports into VLANs, Virtual LANs, or Virtual Local Area Networks, thus disabling the communication between different VLANs even though they are connected to the same switch. This can significantly reduce the network operating costs while providing increased security on the network. In case of managing of a suspect individual port, how do you figure out what port is a trouble maker or a bandwidth hog? Simple. That is yet another possible feature of a managed switch. It is called port monitoring function where you can monitor each individual port performance: Packets sent, received, number of errors and collisions, etc. For even more detailed analysis of the network traffic, managed network switches invoke the port replication feature or port mirroring combined with port sniffing. The reason why port replication or port mirroring is needed when we need to inspect traffic through a certain port is because a switch will only send data to a port that corresponds to the MAC address that the data is intended to. So to use a port sniffer, we need to replicate or mirror the destination port to another, unused port, and put a network sniffer on that new, replicated port to further analyze network traffic to the suspect port.

In the following pages we will discuss further how these and other features of the managed switch can help improve the security and usefulness of your network. We'll also discuss how to determine the requirements for your switch and how and where to buy it.