Asante improves workgroup switch

Most of the news in LAN product introductions these days is coming from smaller companies, rather than the big names.

Maybe the big companies are doing just fine with the products they have, tweaking here and there. Maybe they would rather put most of their development efforts behind other emerging technologies. Or maybe the companies that don’t have as big a market share have further to go to build up their product lines.

Whatever the case, it seems like there have been more new products from network up-and-comers like SMC and Asante Technologies than from others.

Asante recently debuted a new model of its most powerful workgroup switch, which now has four ports of Gigabit Ethernet instead of two, in addition to the 24 ports of 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet. It’s called the FriendlyNet GX5-424W 24+4 WebManaged Gigabit Ethernet switch.

The switch has Web-based management capabilities, a mirroring capability for troubleshooting, virtual LAN support and IEEE 802.1p traffic-prioritization controls.

Two of the Gigabit Ethernet links can be trunked together as one logical link. There are two copper-based Gigabit ports and two places for fiber-based Gigabit modules.

Asante touts the switch’s “plug-and-play operation,” and said it could be up and running in minutes.

The switch is available now for $400, which works out to less than $17 per port without even taking the Gigabit ports into account.