* New 24-port switch supports PoE
Netgear recently added to its line of Smart Switches with a 24-port switch for small and midsized businesses that supports Power over Ethernet.
The latest Smart Switch has 24 ports of 10/100Mbps Ethernet supporting PoE, and four Gigabit Ethernet ports. It’s a managed switch with security and QoS features, and the PoE capabilities enable the switch to support VoIP, wireless access points and IP-based surveillance cameras.
VoIP certainly has taken hold. The financial advantages to VoIP have long been suspect, but many organizations are moving in that direction, regardless. As Chuck Yoke recently wrote in a Network World column, “Voice, specifically VoIP, is the new era of networking.”
This movement is accelerating the pace of PoE development and deployment, and across the board you’re seeing LAN switch vendors offering equipment that provides electrical power over Ethernet ports, so that users can run a single wire to their VoIP phones.
Netgear says its new switch can provide power to each of the 24 ports simultaneously, using the industry-standard 802.3af, with a total power budget of 195 watts.
There are four copper-based Gigabit Ethernet ports, with optional fiber-optic interfaces on two of them. The switch is non-blocking and wire-speed, with a switching capacity of 12.8Gbps.
For security, the switch provides access control lists and authentication using the IEEE 802.1x standard, among other features. Management is done through a Web-based interface, and SNMP v1, v2 and v3 are also supported. Netgear offers a network management software package called ProSafe for SNMP-based management.
The switch is aimed at smaller businesses or branch offices of larger businesses. Netgear now offers PoE-capable switches at 12, 24 or 48 powered ports. The new switch is shipping now for $630.
