Industrial Managed Switches have many additional requirements imposed on them. The industries such as automotive, chemical, electric power, oil exploration, and others require of a managed switch to be able to function in high and low temperature extremes, outdoor, in marine and hazardous locations. They normally must be rugged on the outside and made from the best components on the inside to last in toughest circumstances. There are other, network-based requirements that an industrial managed switch must possess.

What are the network management functions that a solid industrial managed switch needs to have? We'll discuss here the following features: Bandwidth and Quality of Service management, VLAN management including intrusion detection via MAC filtering with MAC table and Guest access management through port authentication, the ability to shut down ports on demand, the ability to mirror and monitor ports, and sniff ports as well.

Bandwidth and Quality of Service, QoS management

Industrial applications often are time critical and they require bandwidth on demand. Many times the bandwidth requirements are high, such as in highway surveillance applications, especially tunnel surveillance applications, airport weather monitoring, airport lighting control and monitoring. In such applications, the managed switches ensure the required bandwidth at all times through port bandwidth assignments. In addition, an industrial managed switches ensure that the bandwidth is available when critically needed through the built-in QoS, Quality of Service feature. In brief, with QoS, the incoming packets are assigned priority and are switched not based on First In First Out, but rather based on the priority.

VLAN management including intrusion detection

High level industrial managed switches have the ability to store thousands of MAC addresses and assign the network traffic to different Virtual Local Area Networks, depending on the MAC address. For instance, one example would be intrusion detection. When an unrecognized MAC address is presented to the network, the switch automatically puts the unrecognized computer on the Guest network, and instantly notifies the responsible network manager of a possible intrusion. In the mean time, the Guest network prevents the unrecognized computer any access to company's data, and gives that computer only highly limited capabilities, such as harmless internet browsing.

Port mirroring, port sniffing, and shutting down ports

Another important application of a managed switch in secure industrial networks is the monitoring and controlling of the ports. The simplest example would be regular monitoring of port traffic. This could include first, port monitoring. Here a port that needs to be inspected is mirrored to an unused port, and then the unused port traffic is inspected using port sniffing, without disrupting the suspect port traffic itself. In case that unwanted activity is detected, the port in question can be shut down or its capacity disabled remotely through the switch management console.

Finally, where to purchase an industrial managed switch

We recommend looking at Amazon first if you know which of the above requirements exactly you have for your managed switch. When you find the model you need online it will likely be much less expensive than buying with specialized online shops. Be sure to see customer reviews and be sure that the review is not dated; the companies do listen to customer feedback and continue to upgrade the firmware on their managed switches, continually making them more robust.