SMC switch joins diverse line

SMC Networks this week unveiled a managed switch and then pitched it as one level of four that it offers in Gigabit switching.

The SMC8024L2 TigerSwitch has 24 ports of 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet. SMC says the management features are targeted at small businesses. The switch can support IEEE 802.1x for security, four levels of QoS, weighted fair queuing, SNMP for management and virtual LANs based on frame tags or ports.

The company says a midsized company that needed multiple switches could get manageability features in this switch without having to pay for stacking or enterprise-level management.

In addition to this class of SMB managed switches, the other three levels that SMC identifies are unmanaged switches, smart switches and enterprise managed switches.

Unmanaged switches are aimed at home or small-office users. They’re cheap and simple and easy to use.

So-called “smart switches” are somewhere in between unmanaged and managed switches. SMC’s smart switches have management features like port trunking for beefed-up switch-to-switch connections, QoS to handle things like VoIP, and virtual LANs for basic network segmentation. They can be managed with a Web-based interface.

The fourth category is enterprise switches, and SMC offers Gigabit Ethernet stackable managed switches in this category. SMC targets these at networks with more than 300 users, aiming the switches at network backbones. They have access control lists and support for 802.1x security, traffic prioritization, rate limiting and Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol.

SMC has built this lineup over time, and now has a story to tell for networks ranging from the very small to the large.